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Six terrible AI-generated jokes about Danish things

Artificial Intelligence programmes such as ChatGPT have made headlines worldwide for writing scarily accurate essays, poems, and even newspaper articles. We decided to ask ChatGPT to tell us some jokes about Danish things, and here's what happened.

Six terrible AI-generated jokes about Danish things
A model takes a selfie an AI-themed fashion show in Hong Kong. The ChatGPT tool can write such impressive paragraphs of human-like text that schools in New York have started blocking it. We used it to tell jokes instead. Photo: Tyrone Siu/Reuters/Ritzau Scanpix

How does this work?

We’re using ChatGPT, an open-source AI model designed for dialogue. Essentially, you type in a question and it generates a response. After testing its article-writing skills (which in some cases were pretty good, in others… not so much), we decided to test how good it was at telling jokes.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t entirely fruitful.

First off, I asked the AI to “tell me a joke about Copenhagen”.

That was a decent opening effort in my book, although I’m an unashamed fan of dad jokes. I gave it another chance.

This one was well wide of the mark. Denmark hasn’t had a king since 1972. I pulled up the AI on this and it skirted the issue.

I took the AI’s cue for the next one and asked it for a joke about the Queen, but its sense of humour seemed to have deserted it.

ChatGPT probably has a point here, though. The conversation was getting a bit royal-heavy, so I went for a different tactic, asking it to “tell us a joke about rye bread”.

This was just about passable I think, but didn’t really raise a laugh. Next up: a real challenge.

This won me over. Although it technically isn’t a joke, the AI just beautifully skewered the most worn-out Danish cliché of all time.

I told it as much and then asked it it to “tell me a joke about the Danish weather”…

Oh dear. Make of this what you will but my take is that it’s not a very funny subject.

I had to start a new chat because of the error and by this point, I was getting a bit tired of the traditional joke format. So I asked it to write a standup comedy routine about Danish politics.

There was no dice here, so I changed tack and asked for a sitcom scene set in a Danish bakery. Here’s a section of the scene:

I like the choice of names but as you can see, the punchlines are scant and I received a ticking off at the end for having requested jokes about politics before.

I concluded the AI’s sense of humour is not easy to “get”, which gives it something in common with Danish humour at least. To finish off, I asked for a haiku about Jutland and received this in reward.

READ ALSO: Nine terrible AI-generated jokes about Swedish things

Member comments

  1. I started to install this. The Terms and conditions seems far more onerous than even social media apps. Of course, I could be incorrect but it seems you must give them permission to copy everything on your computer or on any website you access. So, you are giving them all your banking, tax and personal information. I closed the app and walked away.

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Danish streaming platform to block account sharing

Denmark’s streaming service Viaplay is to follow in the footsteps of international competitors Netflix and Disney by blocking subscribers from sharing their passwords.

Danish streaming platform to block account sharing

In announcing its results for the first quarter of 2024, Viaplay’s director Jørgen Madsen Lindemann said that “more extensive” measures would be put in place this summer to stop login sharing from different locations.

The company estimates around a third of its users share their login.

“We were surprised when we looked into the numbers and got a better insight into the actual scope of this,” Lindemann said.

“It’s something we have to stop,” the director added.

The streaming market, including Viaplay, is under general financial strain, making the end of password sharing across all providers an inevitability, according to an expert.

“It’s obvious that you would go after the areas where you can see extra revenue. Here, I see prevention of login sharing to be a decidedly low-hanging fruit,” Claus Bülow Christensen, a media advisor and the founder of the Copenhagen Future TV Conference, told newswire Ritzau.

Netflix introduced a block on password sharing in 2023, followed shortly afterwards by Disney+. The latter company has since reported an increase in subscribers by some 30 million.

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