A wave of comedy across videos, standup, songs, humor columns, comic strips and art installations is skewering big tech's attempt to make AI ubiquitous and inevitable. The jokes take aim at companies' efforts to normalize AI, the dangers of believing its every word, and its threats to society and the environment, effectively puncturing tech CEOs' relentless narrative that artificial intelligence represents humanity peaking.
From subway ads to mountain summits
In one sketch, a young man struggles to the top of a mountain, words echoing in his ears: "AI will most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there will be great companies created." At the summit, he triumphantly holds up a sign: "Build a datacenter here." On the New York subway, posters herald what appear to be AI startups, including an ad for Cutlery.ai asking "What if forks were spoons?" and another advising viewers that Ziplink is now known as Froggle.
The posters are real, but the companies aren't; the CEO and datacenter scenarios are social media sketches, though the "great companies" quote is a genuine piece of wisdom from Sam Altman. The comedy extends across all forms of media, targeting the absurdity of AI companies' claims and the flaws in their products.
Mocking bots and user experiences
Comedian Ty Eveland trolls AI doctors and HR professionals, the video bots encountered at virtual doctor's appointments or job interviews. Asked about marketing, he tells one 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 earnestly: "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?"
Other comedians parody the user experience. Aya Huseen, repeatedly popping out from behind a door, personifies tech companies' desperate attempts to get users hooked on new AI features: "You sure you don't want to try it with AI?" Tom Nestor imagines "how people who love AI think we 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." In the Atlantic, humorist Alexandra Petri recounts a dream in which everything in her life has pivoted to AI, from children's books – Goldilocks and the 4.5 Bears – to her cereal, which features "subtle changes in the recipe, such as the nuts now being the hard, metal kind."
Artistic pretensions and datacenter fights
Pro-human comedians have also taken aim at AI's artistic pretensions. "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," said comedian Caleb Hearon. A comic strip titled "AI Design Logic" shows a diner telling a waiter "Get me a cheese pizza," then taking credit when the pizza arrives, exclaiming "Wow, look what I made!" Even more succinct is a T-shirt worn by actor Ayo Edebiri: "Do not talk to me about AI. I will kill myself."
The comedy provides a counterbalance to pro-AI declarations. "I would like to think that some of these [companies] are looking at the ridiculousness of where we're at," says Marwan Shaffey, whose videos include a takedown of a water-guzzling Google in 2026. "It does seem like the sentiment is changing, but I think it will take time." Alberta Devor, who spent six and a half years as a software engineer at Google, offers a hack for when someone asks a tricky question: instead of pulling out your phone and asking AI, it's possible to use the LLM in your brain to produce a response. When a colleague wonders what "EOD" means, she immediately tells him. "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 a regular AI user but concerned about overreliance on the products. "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. Comedy, she says, tends to find a more open audience. "It makes people want to engage more, and then you can start to get through to these more complex ideas," she says. "Like maybe we should be using our brain."
The New York subway signs are the brainchildren of comedians Harris Alterman and Dave Ross, who designed a campaign mocking the inscrutable language of bus-stop tech ads and San Francisco billboards. "It was the quickest writing and creative process I've ever had," Ross said. "We made a big Google Doc of every keyword from all these things – 'agents', 'democratize' – and then we made 50 frameworks of these ads." They rearranged and filled in the frameworks, Mad Libs-style, and had them printed. "The more I talk about this, and it's been months now, the more I realize just how disgusted I am with it," Ross says of the ads' language, which is "borderline offensive to the human brain."
Other comics are more direct in their advocacy. British comedian Cody Dahler, condemning "techy tits" such as Palantir CEO Alex Karp, AKA "evil Art Garfunkel", for creating systems "designed to set fire to everything we value as human beings", has urged followers to speak out. Charlie Behrens of Wisconsin has led a fight against datacenters in that state, with parody news broadcasts warning it could soon be "goodbye, America's dairyland and hello, America's motherboard", leading to him headlining gatherings of hundreds.
Altman, the human face of ChatGPT, was recently presented with a clip of Husk, a former landscaper who recently reached a million followers, asking the bot to time a supposed long-distance run, which it got wildly wrong. Altman appeared sheepish: "It's a known issue." Ross doesn't believe comedians should be seen as philosophers, but it would be "wonderful", he says, if humor "woke up an understanding in people's minds that they're also upset, and drove them toward questioning" our AI future. Each small act of comedy offers permission to question our self-appointed AI overlords – a little win for the humans.
