In a recent spoof, I parodied the Daily Mail’s comical publishing habits around veganism. The piece begins:
Katie Price was found dead today after eating a square of vegan cheese. She will never walk again.
It then goes on to describe a shocking new study that shook the vegan community to its emaciated, cruelty-free core:
The tragedy comes days after a major study found that vegan food is ‘less healthy’ than milk, meat, and eggs, and recommended that vegans ‘include some steak’ in their diets and adopt a ‘balanced approach’.
In the experiment, 43 omnivores aged 18 to 39 were studied against a pair of vegan, arthritis-riddled conjoined-twins, both aged 103. The omnivores were instructed to follow a balanced diet containing milk, meat, and eggs, while the twins were instructed to eat a parallel diet of Oreo Cookies and water.
According the study’s lead author, Dr. Toby Privet-Herefordshire, “These surprising results really confirmed what I’d been expecting. My daughter Libby went vegan three months ago. This’ll really shut her up won’t it—she won’t know what to say. Yeah, Libby will be absolutely heartbroken.”
Whenever I write a new article, I post it on Reddit to farm engagement grow my Substack, gain new underlings readers, and hopefully share my writing colonise every country on earth.
Almost instantly, I got a reply, from a smoothie-slurping grass-feeder1 on r/Vegan called “furryhippie” (yikes):
I only got two sentences in.
"Katie Price was found dead today after eating a square of vegan cheese. She will never walk again."
Lazy AI-written articles should at least be coherent. I miss human wit.
I was scandalised, and still am. Going Awol is the home of human wit.
But it also got me thinking: the (entirely reasonable) suspicion that every other self-published bit of writing is GPT-breathed has a lamentable downside. So long as GPT hallucinates and is known for doing so, writers will have an incentive not to use a certain type of humour, lest they be accused of cheating.
There are many philosophical theories of humour2. One of the most historically popular is the Incongruity Theory, which says, in effect, that humour always arises from a certain kind of incongruity. Consider the following Tim Vine jokes:
I was taking the motorway out of London. A policeman pulled me over and said: 'Put it back'
I rang up British Telecom and said: ‘I want to report a nuisance caller.’ He said: ‘Not you again’
“I’m against hunting. In fact, I’m a hunt saboteur. I go out the night before and shoot the fox.”
According to the Incongruity Theorist, these jokes are funny because they exploit a certain incongruity between the expectation we’re set up for in the first half (e.g., that opponents of hunting don’t hunt) and the immediate follow-up, which subverts that expectation.
Though I don’t think this is a perfect theory (there are cases of incongruity between expectation and reality when our response isn’t laughter, but instead disgust, fright, or pity—a good theory should explain why humour is different), I reckon it’s pretty close to the truth.
Incongruity comes in degrees, though. With some types of humour (like yelling “BUGURKK!!” in a very serious meeting), the incongruity is visible from space. I wouldn’t claim [“Katie Price was found dead today after eating a square of vegan cheese. She will never walk again.”] is hilarious or anything, but it was at least an attempt at humour of the conspicuously incongruous kind.
The trouble is, in written contexts (especially ones like this, where the writing isn’t vetted by a publisher—only by God), conspicuously incongruous humour—the openly silly, the plainly non-sensical, the unexpectedly random—looks suspiciously, to any reader with her wits about her, like an obvious, GPT hallucination.
This ‘problem’ will end as soon as the tech gets sufficiently good that LLMs barely hallucinate at all, and bizarre gaps of logic sound characteristically human again. Till then, prepare for writers to get ever so slightly more sensible.
(BUGURKK!!)
Relax, I’m one of you.
Some of them are worse than others:
"in the future, entertainment will be randomly generated"