The Funny Thing About AI
By Sabina GillSabina Gill '29 studies Computer Science and Economics at Bowdoin College, where she took part in the Hastings Fellowship over the summer. In addition, she is involved with theater as well as stand-up and sketch comedy on campus.
Listen, sometimes I find SNL funny, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I look through their archives and find a hidden comedic gem. Other times I wonder if Lorne Michaels was sick the day they decided to greenlight that one. And then there are sketches that make me laugh. I talk about it with my friends. I rewatch it later that day. But when I revisit the sketch some months later, I don't find anything funny about it. It's not so much that the sketch got less funny, more so that the world that I am watching it in has changed since when I first watched it. The sketches that I am talking about are "AI Software" and "AI Photos." Based on the titles (and the fact that you’re reading this on a page titled "Perspectives on AI"), you can guess what the topic of both of these is.
To summarize, "AI Software" follows a teacher showing off a new AI tool for the classroom that turns their textbooks into an AI podcast. Naturally, the AI has some issues including nonsensical dialogue and of course, people with six fingers. "AI Photos" is a play off of those AI apps that are supposed to animate old photos. As you can guess, the program is buggy, resulting in a woman with no legs, a smoking hot dog, and a dog getting cooked on a barbecue. Beyond the shared subject matter, I hope you see the similarities in each sketch: they both introduce AI in a way that is supposed to be useful, yet it fails spectacularly. Fundamentally, the joke is that AI simply doesn't work. This raises the question: what happens when it does?
Both sketches aired in 2025, "AI Software" in January, "AI Photos" in November. In the time it takes me to watch these sketches now, I can scroll through my social media and see hyper realistic videos that require my utmost attention to distinguish from reality. I can talk with an AI agent that follows the flow of natural conversation. The joke was funny when AI really would fail at the most basic tasks, but even the progress made in one year took all of that humor away.
In fact, it didn't even take a year before AI made significant enough advancements. Just one month after "AI Photos" aired, SNL used AI generated images for Weekend Update. It's hard not to read this as a small admission from the show's creators: they understood on some level that they could no longer laugh at AI's inadequacy.
So, what now? AI knows how many fingers a human should have and suddenly nothing is funny about it anymore. Yes, there are plenty of issues with mainstream AI models now, but if the rate of past improvements is anything to go by, they'll be fixed before the cameras can even start rolling on Saturday night. AI can generate realistic images, copy human speech, and spit out multi-page essays in less than a minute. At some point, the joke stops being about what AI can't do, and starts being about what we've allowed it to do. That's a funnier joke, one that SNL hasn't quite figured out how to tell yet.