How Sarah uses AI in comedy writing

Sarah Rose Siskind is incubating two types of intelligence at once: her unborn child, and FetusGPT—an LLM trained on nothing but what she hears and says throughout the day.

This includes Seinfeld episodes, YouTube videos about lemurs, eight hours of snoring per night—and even conversations with me, all condensed into MP3 and text files that are used to train the AI. Since FetusGPT is learning English from such a narrow, idiosyncratic slice of the world, it mostly babbles right now, and if she swears, it picks that up too.

FetusGPT is one zany example of how Siskind uses humor to make a bigger point: AI is what we make of it. It’s an approach that feeds through her comedy writing and work as the founder of science and technology communications agency Hello SciCom.

We had Siskind on AI & I to talk about how she uses AI in her creative process as a comedian, and the unexpected support it's become, both practical and emotional, as she navigates pregnancy.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Start

00:01:54 - Introduction

00:02:03 - How Siskind is running an experiment between her unborn child and an LLM

00:07:34 - A demo of Siskind’s FetusGPT

00:15:16 - Siskind’s pick for the funniest LLM

00:17:12 - How Siskind uses AI in her comedy writing

00:24:41 - Dan and Siskind use ChatGPT to write a joke together live on the show

00:37:21 - Why AI is useful even when you don’t use its output directly

00:44:15 - How Siskind used a ChatGPT project to biohack her energy levels

00:57:09 - A question we fundamentally couldn’t have asked in pre-ChatGPT times

01:05:29 - How ChatGPT is a source of emotional support for Siskind in pregnancy

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Sarah Rose Siskind: https://sarahrosesiskind.com/

Siskind’s agency Hello SciCom: https://www.hellosci.com/

Siskind’s book recommendations: I Forced a Bot to Write This Book, The Let Them Theory, Artificial Intelligence: An Illustrated History