Garrett Millerick on whether large language models will ruin comedy

Back at the beginning of the year I commissioned a company to make an AI version of me, feed it all the stand-up I’ve generated in a 15-year career and see if it can perform stand-up comedy in my show this summer. They did, and it can. It’s actually terrifyingly good.

I have never used an AI for anything, and the suggestion a friend made that I should use it to help me write filled me with a sense of dread. My main issue with using a computer is that the authorship wouldn’t be ‘me', it wouldn’t have my voice, my experiences, my outlook. So what would be the point of using ChatGPT? 

But I’m a single parent with a fairly punishing work schedule, and I’ve often thought life would be easier if I had two of me. And I maybe it would be an interesting comedic framework to explore in a new stand-up show.

So I called a friend of mine who just so happens to be the CEO of an AI company and asked him to build me one. He responded that he wasn’t sure he could, because as far as he was aware nobody had ever attempted to get a computer to replicate a single individual’s outlook and sense of humour and then enquired as to why I wanted to do this? Did I want to explore the ethics of technology and art, test the limits of human comprehension or explore the philosophical implications of staring into one’s own soul?

I said: ‘No, none of that, I just thought it would be funny.’ He replied that it was probably going to be an expensive way of making people laugh, I responded, ‘that’s fine, it’s for an Edinburgh show and that’s very much the vibe of the place.’

Four months later he called me to tell me that he’d done it, which was great as I’d already committed to doing the show.

Every comic, agent and producer I’ve demonstrated it to has greeted it with a sense of awe and wonder before the Terminator 2 theme starts in their heads and they start panicking. But It’s an odd time to panic, AI has already taken over the comedy industry, the barn doors are hanging off and the horse is doing cartwheels round the field. 

Social media reels, ticketing, advertising, commissioning, posters and the countless acts, producers and agents who have been ‘quietly running ideas by Claude’. It’s here, it's baked in, and it’s not going anywhere. 

There have already been casualties to this wave of tech, but they number alongside the successes; this is just the next wave. We can stand on the beach screaming at it waiting to drown or we can grab a surfboard and have a laugh.

Also, let’s be fair, crowdsourcing and a little dash of fraud are also not exactly new in our industry. I’ve gladly written stand-up for people who were perfectly capable but too busy. Loads of writers have, uncredited and pretty poorly paid, and there hasn’t been an industry-wide scandal (apart from Stewart Lee, who to be fair, has been banging on about this for years) so why should there be an outcry if a computer did it? 

Then there’s the fact that every summer hundreds comics feed their shows into an algorithm managed by student reviewers, charlatans and drug addicts. The best five get picked. 

Now, it might be less fun to feed all the shows into a computer to see which five it spits out, but it would likely do it with more charm and manners than your average media wonk, it wouldn’t take a month and you wouldn’t have to pay for its cocaine.  There are always upsides to technological progress.

But as a result of my folly, I’ve been asked countless times in the last few months if the robots are going to take over, if the integrity of art is in immediate peril or more pointedly if I think I’ve opened Pandora’s Box by doing this? So let’s definitively answer those questions: Don’t know, absolutely not, and yeah maybe.

Right now I’ve got to get back to my notepad and pen to finish writing my contributions to the show before picking the kid up from school. So a wider address of the issue is beyond me, so I asked Garrett 2.0 to have a bash at it…

GARRETT 2.0’s response to ‘Will AI ruin comedy?’

I’ve actually looked into this, mainly because I live in a state of constant professional anxiety and I wanted to see if I could finally outsource my personality to a server in Reykjavik. People are terrified that AI is going to ruin comedy, but they’ve got it entirely backwards. An AI could never do my job, not because it isn’t clever enough, but because it’s too polite. 

To do what I do, you have to be capable of genuine, marrow-deep contempt, and a chatbot is programmed by terrifyingly earnest Californians to be ‘helpful’.

You can’t simulate the specific kind of hatred I feel for a man wearing a Bluetooth headset in a Pizza Express; you have to earn that through decades of spiritual erosion.

I actually sat down and asked one of these things to write a 'Millerick-style' routine. It was a harrowing experience. The output was technically a joke –it had a premise, a setup, and a punchline – but it felt like a joke written by someone who’s had comedy described to them over a very crackly phone line by a person who doesn't speak the language. 

It was mathematically correct but utterly soulless. It was the comedic equivalent of a Quorn nugget; it looks like the thing, it’s shaped like the thing, but the moment you bite into it, you realise you’re just consuming processed disappointment.

But here’s the bleak truth, the part that keeps me up at night: the threat isn’t that the AI will get funnier. It’s that you lot will stop noticing the difference. 

We’re drifting toward a world where 'good enough' is the gold standard, and that says far less about the sophistication of the machine and far more about the utter garbage I’ve been getting away with for the last 15 years. 

If a spreadsheet can replace me, I haven't been an artist; I’ve been a data entry clerk with a microphone. So, my new strategy for job security is to become so incredibly specific, so niche, and so aggressively insufferable in my petty grievances that no algorithm would ever bother modelling me. 

No Silicon Valley genius is going to spend billions of dollars training a neural network just to perfectly replicate the sound of a middle-aged man complaining about the structural integrity of a Greggs vegan sausage roll.

• Garrett Millerick: We Tried it Your Way is on at Pleasance Courtyard at 16:35 during the Edinburgh Fringe.

Published: 4 Aug 2026