Can AI do comedy?

 

AI is changing many of our jobs. The pessimists see it as destroying jobs. The optimists see it as increasing productivity and allowing us to shift our energy to even higher value work. We need to understand what AI can and cannot do (yet), and adapt to it. I recently asked ChatGPT whether George Michael (from Wham) had passed away. I vaguely remembered the news but wanted to double check. You see, Google is no longer my default when I want to search the internet. This below was what ChatGPT told me. I don't think it was intentionally trying to be funny. So AI probably can't do comedy. Yet.

"As of my last update in September 2021, George Michael had passed away. He died on December 25, 2016, at the age of 53. Please note that my information might be outdated, so I recommend checking more recent sources to confirm the current status."

Bakuman and the manga industry

 

Bakuman (artist Takeshi Obata, writer Tsugumi Ohba) may not be among the top Japanese comics series (Death Note also by Takeshi Obata is certainly more popular) but it is one of the most important. It is a comic series about the Japanese comic industry. So it is like a movie about the movie industry, or a book about publishing books. It is not only entertaining but also highly educational, almost like a documentary. 

In business we deal with people from many different industries. We tend to draw caricatures of people in those industries, based on our limited knowledge of them. Often there is more depth and more nuances than we realise. It is important to stay humble, so that we can learn from them and appreciate the expertise they have in their fields.