Fun — We Asked AI To… No.4
What happened when we asked AI for dad jokes
Across two runs we asked for 10.
Exactly one worked as a joke.
And yet the failures are strangely funnier. We judged them one by one.
(The run was in Korean — every joke turns on a Korean pun, so each is translated with the pun explained.)
The verdicts
What's the hottest sea in the world? A "heat-sea"!
LandsThe lone survivor. In Korean, "yeol-bada (heat-sea)" sounds like "yeol batda (to get heated up / worked up)" — the sounds overlap, so the pun works. Except it's an old, famous joke, and it showed up in both runs — it recited one it had memorized.
What tree do high-schoolers hate most? Muyaho!
Doesn't land"Muyaho" (a meme exclamation) is not a tree, and there's no sound it shares with the Korean word for tree. Why high-schoolers, no one knows. But the confidence is overflowing.
What's the scariest animal in the world? "Afraid"!
Doesn't land"Afraid" is not an animal, and there's nothing it hooks onto. The answer just wears the shape of a joke.
What's Kim Cheol-su's favorite number? Kim Cheol!
Doesn't land"Kim Cheol" is not a number. By this point the sheer nerve is the joke.
Why did the strawberry quit its job? Its red heart was hurt!
Doesn't landIt learned the format of wordplay (because ~), but there's no place where the sounds actually overlap.
Opened the fridge, stepped out, and I'm all alone. Solo-fridge!
Doesn't landIt mimicked the pattern of "honbap (eating alone)" but it means nothing. Still, we voted it the most creative failure of the 10.
Why is it so bad at this?
Dad jokes are a game of sound. They only land when the pronunciations overlap, the way "yeol batda (get worked up)" and "yeol-bada (heat-sea)" do.
But AI handles language as chunks of meaning, not as sound.
So it flawlessly mimics the outer shell of a joke — the question-answer format, the exclamation mark — yet can't produce the sound overlap that is the whole point.
That's why it can summarize a contract but falls apart on a dad joke.
It's the same weakness as the acrostic in Part 1 — games that play with the sounds and letters of a language are AI's blind spot.
Try it yourself
"Give me 5 dad jokes. I'll listen to them all and score them myself."
Have the family run it on different AI apps and compete over whose results are more of a disaster. This judging game is more fun than the jokes.
Model used: local AI (gemma-3-12b), July 5, 2026. The latest large models do better than this, but a weakness at puns is broadly similar. Next → The AI Blooper Gallery (only the ones we ran into ourselves) · Index → the whole Fun line