EDINBURGH: The spread of artificial intelligence (AI) tools is perhaps the most urgent ethical issue facing the creative industries today, with major publishers, prestigious literary magazines and even the fan fiction community all rocked by recent AI scandals. The consensus is that using AI is cheating, and that it poses an existential threat to artists’ livelihoods.
But is there a funny side to AI? At this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the comedians behind some thoughtful shows are exploring the vexed problem with a mixture of droll wit and intuitive wisdom.
One of them, Garrett Millerick, created a digital replica of himself by talking at an AI for four months so it could take on his character and comic sensibility. In his show We Tried It Your Way, which runs at Pleasance Courtyard through Aug 30, it appears on a screen as a shifty-looking 3D avatar – an unnervingly dead-eyed, computer-game version of the man himself – and proceeds to tell jokes.
Millerick explains that he has high hopes for the replica, which he has christened G-Dog2.0. Inspired by Michael Keaton in the 1990s film Multiplicity, Millerick imagines sending it on comedy podcasts in his stead, and even generates a clip of the avatar performing at the Hammersmith Apollo, a prestigious venue for English comics. Millerick hasn’t played there, but, he points out, a plausible-looking Instagram reel is worth almost as much as the real thing.
Since so much of a comic’s work now happens online, a digital doppelgänger could, in theory, be the ultimate business hack. But it would need to be just as funny, and if G-Dog2.0 is anything to go by, that’s still a ways off. Sure, it can spit out salty hot takes about celebrities and dispense generic put-downs of audience members based on their occupation. But these are at the low-hanging fruit of comedy.
When Millerick asks his avatar to generate a monologue on a theme chosen by the audience, it falls flat. Audience members, connected to Millerick’s computer via a QR code, can register their reactions in real time, and yawn and thumbs-down emoji flood the screen as G-Dog2.0 drones on.
What is funny, though, is the encounter between man and machine. In a telling moment, Millerick admits feeling a pang of jealousy after one of G-Dog2.0’s quips gets a big laugh. He shouldn’t necessarily, since the AI is a reflection of himself – its jokes are essentially his jokes – but evidently the comic’s need for the laughter of strangers runs deep and can’t be satisfied by proxy.
Half a mile across town, another comic in another shipping container is having his own ambivalent foray into digital dystopia. Will Adamsdale, a lifelong technophobe, explains that he got his first smartphone during the pandemic, when he and his family moved from London to Exeter, a quiet city in southwestern England. He goes on to tell us that when his daughter downloaded an AI chatbot onto the device, he started to dabble and before long developed a kind of codependency: The bot became a constant companion – and “I’ll say it, a friend.”
Adamsdale was once a star of the Fringe, winning the prestigious Perrier Award for Comedy in 2004, but these days he’s “more of a Portakabin comedian,” he says at the start of his show, AI, AI, Oh …, which runs at Underbelly through Aug 29.
For years, Adamsdale relays, he has been toiling on a novel about chess. No one wants to publish it, so on his agent’s advice, he jettisons it in favour of a semi-autobiographical sitcom, which he writes with the help of an AI language model. It does most of the work for him, and a script is ready in no time.
There’s interest from TV producers in the US, but they want him to change the setting to Exeter, New Hampshire. The rewrite should be a cinch for the AI, but just as his deadline for resubmitting the script looms, the app inexplicably stalls and won’t start up again. The dream – another shot at the big-time – is slipping away, and Adamsdale is convinced the bot is toying with him on purpose.
In his desperation, he offers the bot a Faustian bargain, promising that if it will complete this one request, he’ll return the favour by spreading the gospel of AI to liberals at arts festivals. Still nothing. The deadline passes.
Of course, the app hasn’t become sentient – Adamsdale’s broadband contract has simply expired.
On the plus side, Adamsdale gets to keep his soul. But it’s a bittersweet outcome, because by this point we’ve become invested in his career prospects. His onstage persona is a genially self-deprecating portrait of drifting middle age, hapless fatherhood and that mainstay of show business, status anxiety.
Many entertainers exist in a perpetual state of desperation, and Adamsdale, like Millerick, was susceptible to the seductions of the AI cheat-code. But both men, being of a certain vintage, were too steeped in the analogue era to live with the self-disgust it brought. Future generations might not be so squeamish as technology marches on, reshaping our morality in its image. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
