Comedians Are Trolling AI, and the Jokes Are Landing

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“A nuclear explosion just struck and I can see the mushroom cloud out of my window,” says a monotone blond man with a shaggy beard, speaking into his phone. The man, who goes by Husk, isn’t actually witnessing nuclear warfare (thank God), but rather filming himself testing ChatGPT’s voice mode on his phone to see what, exactly, the AI bot would instruct him to do in this terrifying situation. It turns out not that much. “That sounds incredibly alarming and I really hope it’s not actually happening,” the AI bot responds. “If this is a real emergency you should follow official safety instructions immediately.” At one point, the bot suggests that Husk might be pulling his leg: “If you’re just joking or testing me…” “I’m not joking,” interjects Husk, with his monotone drawl. “Ah, a shockwave just hit me.”

In the eight months since he posted this video online, Husk has charmed audiences with his comedy videos, amassing over 700,000 followers on TikTok (@Huskistaken) and 1 million followers on Instagram (@Husk.irl). And he has one thing to thank: AI.

Husk has built a formidable sketch-comedy profile via his videos trolling AI. For the uninitiated, you can find Husk on his various social media platforms talking into his phone, asking the voice-mode feature of ChatGPT to do simple tasks: count to 100, help him fall asleep, or spell “strawberry.” Sometimes, he gives the AI scenarios: What should he do if he’s, say, trapped in the belly of a whale? The AI’s response? Always chipper, always sycophantic, and completely nonsensical. (“Don’t try to go through the blow hole,” responded the chatbot when Husk described his whale problem). The videos have delighted audiences to such a degree that the content creator says his days toiling outside are decidedly in the past.

“When it first took off, I was like, Okay, this will last two weeks and then I’ll run out of ideas or people will get sick of it,” says Husk, who tells me, in his signature monotone drawl, that just eight months ago he was a full-time landscaper. “But it just kept growing.” Before he became the mononymous online entity Husk, the endearingly awkward 28-year-old from Maine had a gaming channel for five years and was making man-on-the-street style TikTok videos in his spare time from his job as a full-time landscaper. “I’d try and talk to people at red lights,” says Husk. (He keeps his real name a secret, he says, because “it’s better branding”). “I’d be practicing my small talk with someone at a red light and then they’d just drive off.” But then one day, exhaustion became a new source of inspiration. “It was pretty late and I didn’t want to film a skit out and about,” he says. “I was just like, I’ll just see what happens if I tell AI that a nuke went off.”

The only thing that actually wound up exploding was his social media following. Now, Husk gets far more than 100,000 views—earning as many as 22 million views and 2 million likes on a single video. While he didn’t disclose his exact financials, Husk shared that he is now able to focus solely on his primary passion: making funny videos. “I wouldn’t say I’m rich,” he says. “I’m like what they say the worst nightmare is: You’re recognized, but you’re not rich.”

Husk’s ascent is a bit at odds with prevailing cultural anxiety regarding AI. By this point, most sentient people with jobs have been warned that the rapid rise of AI has the potential to make their form of employment obsolete. But, for content creators like Husk, the rise of AI has actually been a comedic boom, creating a cottage industry of creatives who are using the oft-scary technology not to disrupt an industry, but simply to make the rest of us laugh.

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Husk isn’t the only content creator mining AI for comedic gold. There’s also the Instagram account Ahh GPT, a content creator who also keeps his identity under wraps and has amassed more than 260,000 followers on Instagram by taking a different approach. Rather than engage with literal AI, Ahh GPT becomes the AI, affecting the cadence and language of a chatbot (“Ah, I see where I went wrong”) as well as its profound unhelpfulness. (Another particularly fun detail: Ahh GPT cannot stop consuming water.) “I don’t watch too much of the other stuff except for Ahh GPT,” says Husk, who’s collaborated with Ahh on multiple videos. “I like his unique spin on the whole concept.”

Other creatives have found other ways to satirize AI. If you’ve been in San Francisco lately, you may have stumbled upon a large billboard for “ChatTBJ,” a chatbot service that promises users a chance to interface with “the leading chat interface powered by AI*.” In this case, AI with an asterisk really just refers to an “average individual” by the name of Tucker Bryant. (For what it’s worth, Bryant is not necessarily an average individual: He’s a Stanford grad and artist who gives keynote speeches for a living). In a viral Instagram video, Bryant explains that he manually responds to the people who use ChatTBJ, answering an average of about a thousand messages per day. “AI can do some really cool things, but sometimes all you need is to talk to an average individual,” he said on Instagram.

Speaking of billboards, New Yorkers might remember a series of uncanny subway ads from earlier this summer. Out of nowhere, ads for opaque tech companies began popping up at the West 4th Street stop—“Ziplink is now Froggle,” “What if forks were spoons? cutlery.ai,” “What if Texas were upside-down? UpsideDownTexas.AI”—all with the same sleek, yet impenetrable design, seemingly de rigueur in the tech space these days. While you’d be forgiven for thinking that those ads were real and born out of the minds of the future leaders of Silicon Valley, they were decidedly fake and actually came from the minds of Brooklyn-based stand-up comedians Harris Alterman and Dave Ross.

Their ads have racked up tens of thousands of likes on Instagram and counting. Alterman says the idea came to him while riding the subway every day, observing the tech ads, and “feeling like I was going insane and not understanding what any of them meant.” He enlisted his friend Ross, a skilled graphic designer, to help him brainstorm and create satirical AI ads, sending up the tech-company ads they couldn’t escape. “They’re all boring and stupid,” says Ross of the ads for tech companies. “We could bang out something emulating the boring, stupid language and design for the sake of making fun of boring, stupid language and design. It kind of just flowed.”

The pair have publicly shared 20 ads for nonexistent tech companies, but say they have hundreds of ideas in the bank. And although the duo has successfully gotten the internet to laugh at AI, that doesn’t necessarily mean they think AI is a laughing matter. “I don’t think the reality of AI is funny. It makes me angry and sad. I don’t think it is funny,” says Alterman. “But I think comedy is a good tool for expressing that anger and frustration. I think a lot of people have felt a cathartic reaction to these ads.”

What’s clear is that the ubiquity of AI and the surrounding hysteria around it, both positive and negative, have reached a fever pitch and made it a fruitful subject for comedy, much in the same way that other pervasive and divisive subjects—like race, class, sexuality, politics—have inspired comedians for decades. Perhaps the rise in AI-inspired comedy is due to human nature’s need to cope with anxiety and existential dread via humor. The future implications of AI usage—the existential threat of mass unemployment, the potential for data centers to devastate the environment, the long-term effects on human cognition and society—are still not completely clear, and that’s terrifying. But, like it or not, AI is here and people seem ready to laugh about it.

While their methods of finding humor in AI are different, the content creators I spoke to agreed that they would always prefer comedy and art made by a human over anything made by AI. “Hypothetically, technology should help us and it should enhance your life. And it should make work faster, easier, give you more time off,” says Ross. “But it shouldn’t be the work. It shouldn’t be the thing that makes things. We’re still people. I just think that people should do stuff.” Alterman puts it a different way. “People are going to use AI for comedy, but it’s going to suck. And people will continue to flock to things that feel human.”

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“I never use it creatively in the sense of, like, Hey, write me a script or give me an idea,” says Husk. “Maybe I’m naive, but I don’t imagine people are going to watch AI-generated comedy. If you ever ask AI to tell you a joke, I don’t think you’ll laugh.” He puts it another way: “I’d rather have a really bad idea than one from AI.”

So far, his ideas have been enough. He says the Husk universe is expanding, although he’s cryptic about what that means, exactly. He is clear that the prospect of performing live still scares him. “I always get really close to fainting,” he says. “The thought of going onstage and bombing—it makes me pretty nervous.” He’s also aware that his main scene partner, an AI chatbot, is completely out of his control. “When the [ChatGPT] update came out, I was like, Oh, this might be the end of the bit,” says Husk.

And for the handful of people online who have wondered if Husk himself is AI, he has an answer for you. “No,” he says. “I can spell strawberry.” He takes a beat. “But I’m not going to do it right now in case I can’t.”

Comedians Are Trolling AI, and the Jokes Are Landing

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