It is the punchline nobody asked for, but everyone seems to need. Across social media, comedy clubs, subway carriages and cereal packets, a new wave of humour is taking aim at the technology industry’s most sacred cow – artificial intelligence. And the laughs are proving more powerful than any boardroom pitch.
The Joke Is on Silicon Valley
The tech titans would have you believe that artificial intelligence is humanity’s finest hour: inevitable, all-powerful, and absolutely essential to our future survival. “Best case scenario, we never have to do any admin again. Worst case, we all die,” reads one rather bleak summary of the AI CEO mindset.
Comedians are having none of it. From satirical sketches of mountain-climbing executives holding “Build a datacenter here” signs to subway posters advertising fictional startups like Cutlery.ai and Froggle, humourists are systematically dismantling the industry’s relentless propaganda. The comedy extends across every medium – videos, standup routines, songs, comic strips, humour columns and art installations – and its target is clear: the absurdity of a sector that wants us to believe AI is both the end of the world and the greatest thing since sliced bread.
It helps that public opinion is already leaning sceptical. A March Gallup poll found that 79% of Americans believe AI will reduce jobs. A CNN survey this week revealed that 81% of respondents feel more concerned than excited about how the technology could fundamentally reshape daily life. Only 11% would support a datacenter being built in their local area, according to research from UMass Amherst. Meanwhile, a small cadre of extraordinarily wealthy individuals continue to pontificate about reshaping what it means to be human between podcast appearances and conference stages.
When the Bots Fail to Deliver the Punchline
Some of the sharpest comedy comes from exposing the gaping holes in AI products themselves. Ty Eveland, for instance, has made a name for himself by trolling AI doctors and HR professionals – the very bots you might awkwardly encounter during a virtual medical consultation or job interview. In one sketch, when asked about marketing, he tells a bot interviewer he takes “everything with a grain of salt and maybe a little bit of pepper.” The bot, portrayed as a generically handsome blond man, responds with earnest incomprehension: “When you say you take things with a grain of salt and pepper, what does that actually mean for a brand’s social media strategy?”
If bots are approaching superintelligence, this particular model has clearly been left behind at the starting line.
Other comedians have turned their attention to the user experience itself. Aya Huseen personifies tech companies’ desperate attempts to hook users on every new AI feature, appearing repeatedly from behind a door to plead: “You sure you don’t want to try it with AI?” “This would be so much funner with AI.” “Just try generating it with AI.” Meanwhile, Tom Nestor imagines how AI enthusiasts think the rest of us see them, telling a friend on the phone: “Do you know what I also really like? It’s not so good now but in years to come it’ll get so good that it’ll just completely alter people’s grasp of reality.”
The Atlantic’s Alexandra Petri took a more literary approach, recounting a dream in which every aspect of her life had pivoted to AI – from children’s books (Goldilocks and the 4.5 Bears) to her breakfast cereal, which now features “subtle changes in the recipe, such as the nuts now being the hard, metal kind.”
Pro-Human Voices Rising Above the Noise
The artistic pretensions of AI have not escaped the comedians’ wrath either. “If you are somebody who uses ChatGPT to generate videos, images, art, text, in an artistic capacity, to write for you, you are not somebody who deserves to be taken seriously,” declared comedian Caleb Hearon during a pointed moment on his podcast. A comic strip titled “AI Design Logic” captured the sentiment with brutal simplicity: a diner tells a waiter “Get me a cheese pizza,” and when the pizza arrives, the customer takes credit, exclaiming: “Wow, look what I made!” It is scathingly effective and highly meme-able. Even more succinct is the T-shirt worn by actor Ayo Edebiri: “Do not talk to me about AI. I will kill myself.”
Behind many of these jokes stands a deeper message about understanding the technology rather than blindly accepting it. Alberta Devor, a former software engineer who spent six and a half years at Google, offers a cool hack in one of her videos: when someone asks you a tricky question, you do not need to pull out your phone and consult AI – it is entirely possible to use the large language model already residing between your ears. When a colleague wonders what “EOD” means, she immediately provides the answer. “How’d you ask Claude that so fast?” he asks. “I trained a model in my head,” she replies. “I just consumed a lot of media, a lot of books.”
Devor is herself a regular AI user, but she remains deeply concerned about overreliance on these products, whether for information-seeking or coding. “The message that I want people to take home is to actually understand what they’re asking AI, to actually understand what the limitations of it are,” she says in an interview. Her serious videos often attract backlash, but comedy, she notes, tends to find a more receptive audience. “It makes people want to engage more, and then you can start to get through to these more complex ideas,” she explains. “Like maybe we should be using our brain.”
From Subway Posters to Political Action
Not all of the anti-AI comedy is confined to screens. The fake New York subway signs mocking tech advertising were the brainchild of comedians Harris Alterman and Dave Ross, who designed a campaign lampooning the inscrutable and frankly insufferable language of bus-stop tech advertisements and San Francisco billboards.
“It was the quickest writing and creative process I’ve ever had,” Ross said. The tech advertising tropes were so clear, and so alien to how any human has ever actually spoken, that they practically satirised themselves. “We made a big Google Doc of every keyword from all these things – ‘agents’, ‘democratise’ – and then we made 50 frameworks of these ads.” They rearranged and filled in the frameworks Mad Libs-style, then had them printed.
What began as a joke soon revealed deeper frustrations. “The more I talk about this, and it’s been months now, the more I realise just how disgusted I am with it,” Ross says of the advertising language, which he describes as “borderline offensive to the human brain.”
Other comedians are translating their scepticism into direct advocacy. The British comedian Cody Dahler has condemned figures such as Palantir CEO Alex Karp – whom he dismissively calls “evil Art Garfunkel” – for creating systems “designed to set fire to everything we value as human beings,” and has urged followers to speak out publicly. Charlie Behrens of Wisconsin has led a grassroots fight against datacenters in his state, his parody news broadcasts warning it could soon be “goodbye, America’s dairyland and hello, America’s motherboard” – a campaign that has propelled him to headline gatherings of hundreds.
The Power of the Punchline
It may be, as Ross concedes, “a little lofty to expect that your comedy could topple a billion-dollar corporation.” But the collective weight of these jokes provides a genuine counterbalance to the pro-AI declarations emanating from corporate headquarters. Marwan Shaffey, whose videos include a takedown of a water-guzzling Google and its Gemini-generated search results that prioritise vibes over accuracy, believes the tide may already be turning. “I would like to think that some of these companies are looking at the ridiculousness of where we’re at” and might be swayed by the success and relatability of comedy mocking their products, he says. “It does seem like the sentiment is changing, but I think it will take time.”
The power of comedy was demonstrated recently when Sam Altman, the human face of ChatGPT, was presented with a clip of Husk, a former landscaper who had amassed a million followers, asking the bot to time a supposed long-distance run – which it got spectacularly wrong. Altman appeared sheepish: “It’s a known issue.”
Ross does not believe comedians should be mistaken for philosophers, but he holds out hope that humour might “wake up an understanding in people’s minds that they’re also upset, and drive them toward questioning” our AI future.
Why it Matters
In an era dominated by corporate messaging that frames artificial intelligence as both unavoidable and essential, comedy serves a vital democratic function: it restores the public’s permission to doubt. When 79% of Americans fear job losses and 81% express more anxiety than excitement about the technology, the industry’s narrative of benevolent inevitability is clearly faltering. Comedians, with their unique ability to cut through jargon and expose absurdity, are doing what lectures and policy papers have struggled to achieve – they are making scepticism socially acceptable, even entertaining. Each joke, each subway poster, each viral sketch represents a small but significant act of resistance against a future designed by and for a handful of tech executives. In the battle over who controls our relationship with AI, laughter may prove to be one of the most potent weapons ordinary people possess.
