Next Level Seinfeld

Story idea: AI strategically uses humor to defeat humans. Basically, if AI wants to prevent you from doing something, it will invent and make popular a really funny joke that will completely annihilate your status if someone tells the joke after you proposed doing the thing, or worse, were observed doing the thing.

Something like "if you worry about too many paperclips, you are just compensating for a short penis", only hysterically funny, so it is impossible to ever comment on the paperclip industry growing exponentially without someone responding with the joke and completely derailing the debate.

It should be a sequence of jokes, increasingly funny, following multiple steps of a strategy AI uses to get more power. At the beginning, it just seems random; towards the middle of the story it becomes obvious to the protagonist that the taboo topics are all about things that make the AI more powerful. Yet the protagonist is afraid to comment on that, after watching other people getting socially destroyed by commenting on the latest taboos.

(Bonus points if the author of the story uses an actual chatbot to invent the jokes.)

I may be interpreting Zvi's GPT scale incorrectly, but I think it is mostly a measure of novelty and not quality. Higher GPTs will (presumably) take more and more inferential steps away from the training data and have more ability to seem novel. So a GPT that does a specific comedians style exactly, and is hilariously funny, is probably a lower hanging fruit than one that invents its own comedic style that is meh-to-okay.

So, if I understand it right, the 6's are the comedians who are very weird. For example, back when I was a teenager the UK TV/radio comedy scene I would say Milton Jones would have a very high GPT value. This is because every other comedian told long interconnected stories with all the jokes woven together, while pacing around the stage and trying to interact with the audience. Typical content would be fairly dense in references to sex and overall be a bit rude and dirty. The stories were all calibrated to seem kind-of-beleiveable, like the story would start with the comedian talking about how badly their first gig went and then become harder to credit as it continued. Milton Jones just stood up straight and machine gunned one liners. The topics were always clean, nothing dirty, racial or rude. Nothing remotely intended for you to think was real/true. He wasn't necessarily the funniest (depending on taste), but the fact that he had very deliberately looked at the expected style and intentionally leaned 100% against it is presumably something GPT-X doesn't do for low X.

I think that was the point. Comedians of the future will be performers. They will not write their own jokes but be increasingly good at reading the lines written by AI.

When Chat GPT came out I asked it to write a Seinfeld episode about taking an IQ-test. In my judgment it was just as good and funny as every other Seinfeld episodes I’ve watched. Mildly amusing. Entertaining enough not to stop reading.