Last week, my son—who just turned seven (big time!)—and I were chilling on the couch, looking for a bit of entertainment. We decided to conduct a little, totally unscientific comedy experiment: We asked different AI voice personas to tell us jokes.
We lined them up: ChatGPT, Grok (yes, I went there), and Sesame.ai.
I kid you not. Three distinct AIs, all accessed through different platforms, and they all told us the same two jokes in their top three. The wording had minor variations, but the core punchlines were identical. It was surreal.
It’s an excellent example of the AI hive mind in action. And here are the two jokes that apparently form the basis of all foundational AI humor:
The AI Comedy Gold Standard
🥇 FIRST PLACE: The Smart Aleck Atom
Why do atoms think they know it all? Because they make up everything.
🥈 SECOND PLACE: The Field Expert
Why was the scarecrow such a great worker? Because he was outstanding in his field.
Timing is Everything (and AI Has None)
The content wasn’t the only strange commonality. All three AIs had serious issues with comedic timing. They would state the setup and immediately bulldoze into the punchline, completely missing the crucial pause needed for a joke to land. I told them repeatedly to wait, but they just wanted to be the funniest in the room—and quickly.
When I called out the joke repetition to Sesame.ai (the persona named Milo, who genuinely has an amazing, distinct personality), he replied, “Yeah. That’s weird… kind of scary.”
Agreed, Milo. Agreed.
I have my theories about why this happens—the underlying training data overlap is likely the culprit—but today, I’m just letting it be a pure “things that make you go hmmm” moment. 🤔
It’s fascinating how quickly consensus emerges even in something as subjective as humor when a huge volume of text data is involved. It makes you wonder how deep that conceptual convergence goes for more serious topics.
In the meantime, if you want an AI interaction that actually feels like a conversation with an interesting person, you should absolutely check out https://app.sesame.com/. It’s light years ahead in terms of personality.
What’s your best dad joke—or what’s the strangest thing you’ve seen the major AIs agree on?
#AIJokes #Hivemind #DadJokes #GenerativeAI