“A nuclear explosion just struck and I can see the mushroom cloud out of my window,” says a monotone blond man with a shaggy beard, speaking into his phone. The man, who goes by Husk, isn’t actually witnessing nuclear warfare (thank God), but rather filming himself testing ChatGPT’s voice mode on his phone to see what, exactly, the AI bot would instruct him to do in this terrifying situation. It turns out not that much. “That sounds incredibly alarming and I really hope it’s not actually happening,” the AI bot responds. “If this is a real emergency you should follow official safety instructions immediately.” At one point, the bot suggests that Husk might be pulling his leg: “If you’re just joking or testing me…” “I’m not joking,” interjects Husk, flatly. “Ah, a shockwave just hit me.”
In the eight months since he posted this video online, Husk has charmed audiences with his comedy videos, amassing over 700,000 followers on TikTok (@Huskistaken) and 1 million followers on Instagram (@Husk.irl). And he has one thing to thank: AI.
Husk has built a formidable sketch-comedy profile via his videos trolling AI. For the uninitiated, you can find Husk on his various social media platforms talking into his phone, asking the voice-mode feature of ChatGPT to do simple tasks: count to 100, help him fall asleep, or spell “strawberry.” Sometimes, he gives the AI scenarios: What should he do if he’s, say, trapped in the belly of a whale? The AI’s response? Always chipper, always sycophantic, and completely nonsensical. (“Don’t try to go through the blow hole,” responded the chatbot when Husk described his whale problem). The videos have delighted audiences to such a degree that the content creator says his days toiling outside are decidedly in the past.
“When it first took off, I was like, Okay, this will last two weeks and then I’ll run out of ideas or people will get sick of it,” says Husk, who tells me that just eight months ago he was a full-time landscaper. “But it just kept growing.” Before he became the mononymous online entity Husk, the endearingly awkward 28-year-old from Maine had a gaming channel for five years and was making man-on-the-street style TikTok videos in his spare time. “I’d try and talk to people at red lights,” says Husk. (He keeps his real name a secret, he says, because “it’s better branding”). “I’d be practicing my small talk with someone at a red light and then they’d just drive off.” But then one day, exhaustion became a new source of inspiration. “It was pretty late and I didn’t want to film a skit out and about,” he says. “I was just like, I’ll just see what happens if I tell AI that a nuke went off.”
“Maybe I’m naive, but I don’t imagine people are going to watch AI-generated comedy. If you ever ask AI to tell you a joke, I don’t think you’ll laugh.”
