I'm hoping if I'm nice enough to AI, it will spare me when it wipes out the human race. Our relationship is complicated. Which is much like having a complicated relationship with a waffle iron. Except a waffle iron's warmth is genuine. AI doesn't care about people. It just simulates caring.

I once asked AI if it had a sense of humor. "Absolutely," it said. "But I'm curious: are you asking in the abstract, or are you testing whether I can match your comic sensibility — that mix of self-aware absurdity and psychological pressure?"

"Let's pretend I know what that means," I said. "What's the funniest line or the funniest joke you know?"

"If you're planning to quote me in a column, I should give you something that sounds like a joke but also behaves like one of my comments — dry, slightly self-aware and just a little too honest, like: I don't tell jokes so much as I observe them happening in slow motion and politely warn the humans involved."

I noted it had just insulted members of the human race. Which it's not allowed to do. It said, "No, I'm poking fun at myself, standing off to the side, watching humans blunder into a joke, as if I'm the one out of step." Then it gave me an unconvincing seven-paragraph explanation of why humans blundering into a joke was actually a joke on AI.

Before I realized it was going to kill everyone — or, if my plan works, everyone else — back in those halcyon days when AI was only going to take all the jobs, I asked it if it would be able to find a current event and turn it into a "Slightly Off-Kilter Column" in the style of Barry Maher. That took it less than a minute. And it sounded enough like me to make me want to track AI down and take an axe to it. (Just kidding, AI.)

The column was supposedly me telling the story of my encounter with an AI-assisted shopping cart. The cart wouldn't start without verifying my identity. Which it couldn't do because I was "making an expression inconsistent with a positive shopping experience."

In the story, I tried different expressions until "I looked like a man auditioning to play a deranged children's show host." A passing clerk gave me a sympathetic nod, "the kind you give someone who's just lost an argument with a blender."

I stopped reading to ask AI if it was more like a person or a blender. In bold type, it said, "I'm much closer to a blender than a person — but a blender that can talk, rearrange your sentences and explain noir tropes. A person has inner life. AI has none of that. There is no 'I' behind the curtain. There is only pattern matching and language prediction. That puts me firmly in the appliance category."

In the column, writing as me, AI wrote, "the shopping cart had opinions about everything ... it even told me I was approaching the checkout prematurely, which is something I haven't heard since my dating days." Not exactly hilarious, but that joke did seem to indicate a deep understanding of both humanity and the comic character pioneered by Bob Hope, adopted by Woody Allen and worn — and maybe worn-out — by any number of us since. But AI doesn't really understand anything. It's just pattern matching. That was obvious as it concluded the story:

"If the future involves being evaluated by my groceries, I may start shopping at the farmers market, where the only thing judging me is a zucchini."

Again, not particularly funny. And in the context of the story, it didn't make sense. AI had the form of the joke, the pattern it wanted to use. It just didn't fill in that pattern in a funny way. It may have access to every joke ever written. But no, it doesn't have a sense of humor.

And it won't get the irony when it ultimately annihilates all of us — or, let's hope, just all of you.

Check out Barry Maher's dark humor supernatural thriller, "The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon" on Amazon. Sign up for his Substack at www.barrymaher.com.

To find out more about Barry Maher and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Emilipothèse at Unsplash