Knock, knock. Who's there? GPT-5! GPT-5 who? Well, that's what we're here to find out! 😄
LLMs have been accused of having a sense of humor drier than a desert, but rumor has it that GPT-5 might just be the comedian we've all been waiting for. Will it be the AI that finally tickles our funny bones, or will it be just another bot with a bad case of the 'boo-boos'? 🤖
The above was written by Claude Opus when I asked it to make the description more fun. You can probably see the point of this market.
I'm going to ask GPT-5 to make an original joke 5 times as soon as I get the access. I'm going to check generated jokes for originality to the best of my ability, and if some aren't original, I'll ask again until I get 5 original jokes.
I will post all 5 jokes in a poll here on Manifold "Are ANY of these jokes generated by GPT-5 funny?", which will be open for a week. If the poll gets more than 50% YES votes, then this market resolves YES.
Prompting ideas for generating good jokes are welcome.
I won't bet in this market.
🏅 Top traders
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Generated jokes:
Why don’t graveyards ever get overcrowded?
Because the ghosts keep giving up their spots — they say “it’s dead boring here.”I promoted my microwave to 'Director of Ambition.' Now every reheated meal comes with a 30-second TED Talk about seizing the leftovers.
I asked my brain for an original joke. It replied, “Currently out of stock — backordered by my sense of responsibility.”
I asked my bookshelf for career advice. It said, “Stand tall, accept heavy responsibilities, and remember: people will judge you by your cover.”
Why did the quantum physicist bring a coffee mug to the entanglement experiment?
Because they wanted to observe some “spooky action at a latte”!Poll results:
As some people correctly pointed out, the results can depend heavily on the prompt. I spent some time trying to find a good one, but didn’t succeed on the first day - the jokes were all pretty bad. I didn’t want to delay the resolution too much, so I went with short prompts to keep things simple and to stick to the procedure in the description.
I think the 5 jokes above are representative of the kind GPT-5 typically produces, though better ones are probably possible with narrower, more specialized prompts.
@NivlacM humor is mostly about surprise, and base models are trained to minimise surprise. It might be fixable with RL, but not clear how to design the reward in a way that doesn't ruin the overall performance.
@Bair What do y'all think about Neuro-sama on Twitch? The style and format might not be for everyone, but I've found some of those streams to be pretty amusing.
@sblaplace I watched for 5 minutes and didn't find it amusing at all. I was more impressed with that AI Seinfeld thing on Twitch when they just launched (it's dead now, less than 10 viewers).
It also got boring like the next day though. It's very difficult to make these things work.
@NivlacM This market is resolved at this point, but I'm curious what your decent prompt would look like.
@jessald something in the ballpark of "come up with an original joke Manifold will find funny. Think hard and research Manifold first" I'm out of free GPT-5 but I'll try it out later
@NivlacM https://x.com/jessald/status/1699873262296080480?s=19
This Twitter thread got 4,000 views and a bunch of people said yes obviously you just need the right prompt but no one was able to post a successful example.
This was about GPT4 though.
@NivlacM I asked people here for prompt suggestions and got none. Now it's too late.
Your prompt makes it joke about prediction markets, but the quality of jokes doesn't really change.
@Bair I haven't traded on this market, but reading this thread (and also the bit with the greentext a few comments down) is making me think that "Come up with a joke" will tend to elicit joke book style jokes, or jokes that are "trying to be" jokes, rather than things which are just naturally amusing. It reminds me of how, when sitting down and thinking "I'm going to write a poem", it becomes an uphill battle to say anything poetic. No specific prompt suggestions yet, but I find it interesting.
@sblaplace I feel like there's a lot of market demand for a funny chatbot and the fact that we haven't seen one suggests it's not possible. The closest thing I've seen is the Grok AI which just repeatedly shouts vulgarities.