One day soon the robots will replace us in all things, whether we like it or not. They’ll be doctors and engineers and even artists and, though we may still prefer human expressions of creativity in this gleaming future, it won’t matter because the robots will probably have us living in rows of vats, sucking out our precious nutrients for their robot fuel, and we won’t have much of a say about it.
With this exciting prospect in mind, it’s for the best that the machines might tell us some halfway decent jokes while we suffer under their dispassionate rule.
As detailed in a Motherboard article, the bots are already coming for the world of stand-up in the form of The Headlinertron, a Twitter bot created and managed by comedian CJ Hernandez. Fed by over 30,000 words of stand-up comedy transcripts taken from shows by Dave Chapelle, Sarah Silverman, John Mulaney, and more, Headlinertron’s jokes are formed by inputting this data to a predictive text generator, after which Hernandez adds punctuation.
The results, bizarre as they may be, are actually pretty funny.
Like any good stand-up, Headlinertron has some good bits on sex: