Quick Take
The Santa Cruz Comedy Festival begins Tuesday with an intriguing premise: Can human stand-up comics out-roast artificial intelligence in a head-to-head matchup? Harmon Leon's game-show-style throwdown seeks to find out.
Yeah sure, the Santa Cruz Comedy Festival is all about laughs — as it should be. But don’t let those stand-up performances popping up all over town over the course of five days fool you: This festival also has something profound on its mind — at least, judging from its opening event.
The comedy fest kicks off Tuesday with a show at The Blue Lagoon in downtown Santa Cruz called “AI Vs. Human Comic Roast Battle.” It’s designed as merely an evening of entertainment, but, if you think about it for more than half a minute, this show is really touching on some intriguing questions: Is humor an essentially human trait? Or, can artificial intelligence actually tell a decent joke?
The show is structured much like a three-round game show in which a professional comedian goes up against a ChatGPT-style AI bot in a back-and-forth battle of entertaining insults known as roasting. Comedian, writer and filmmaker Harmon Leon is coming to Santa Cruz as the show’s host — he’s not the comic contestant, but rather overseeing the AI program in real time.
“It’s very much like WWE wrestling,” said Leon. “We’re all rooting for the human and the AI is the villain.”
Leon has staged the show many times over the past year and a half, and often he’ll design the AI to adopt the personality of a famous figure. In Santa Cruz, he’ll be bringing along the AI version of Fred Rogers — better known as Mr. Rogers. That’s right — the sweetest, kindest man who ever lived is participating in a hostile exchange of insults.
“Well, you see, that brings in the dichotomy,” said Leon. “We all love Mr. Rogers. But when he starts trashing humans as being inferior [to AI], then you’re not sure where your allegiance goes.”
The first round features a general humanity-versus-bots throwdown. But in the second round, Leon will feed specific information about the comedian contestant into the AI program and the roast becomes personal. Then comes the third and final round, in which the human contestant will have to compete against an AI-created model of themselves. Three celebrity judges will be on hand to decide whether the carbon-based side or the silicon-based side won the roast.
When Leon first started doing this show in early 2023, ChatGPT had just been released to the public, and the technology was too slow to engage in a lightning-fast round of zingers. Since then, it has improved dramatically.
“It’s a constantly evolving technology that will throw surprises at you,” said Leon. “It’s not just who is funnier. But the AI has different components to it that make it superior to humans. For example, it has the entire works of Shakespeare it can throw into a roast. Suddenly, it can be roasting you in Dutch. Imagine Mr. Rogers roasting you in Dutch.”
From his base in New York, Leon has been producing the AI roast show in various venues all over the country. His shows not only attract comedy fans, but also bring in the tech-curious. “People who wouldn’t normally go to a comedy show will come just to see how AI is used in creative ways,” he said. “We have a regular residency in New York, and it pretty much sells out every month.”
Leon said that the stakes of humanity versus AI aren’t as stark as they seem. The AI technology is simply adept at scraping the internet for appropriate responses, and pure, in-the-moment creativity is, he said, still the realm of the human mind. Besides, his own role programming the AI, giving it data it might not otherwise have, puts the thumb on the scale in favor of humanity.
“As long as the tech gets more sophisticated, the show will get more sophisticated. And that sophistication has grown a lot in the last year. But the human element of me creating the show is still something AI can’t replicate,” he said. “So the comedy writing element is, once you set a pattern and people now think the pattern is predictable, you’ve got to change up the pattern. There has to be a twist. And that’s where the human hand comes in with structuring the show. You got to make sure that there’s always these twists that the audience doesn’t see. And AI’s not going to do that part.”
“AI Versus Human Comic Roast Battle” takes place Tuesday at The Blue Lagoon.
It’s the opening event of the Santa Cruz Comedy Festival, Oct. 1-5.
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