How humorous can AI be?

It is a late California afternoon at the tail end of the week, and as work winds down, I wonder if the current genre of frontier LLMs can be humorous and whimsical.

So I asked Claude to create something that would have been challenging for LLMs a couple of years ago: a humorous parody of pseudoscientific writing. I asked it to write a "convincing" letter arguing for the "flat-earth" hypothesis. Here, I am posting what Claude came up with, and I must say I laughed at it for a long time!

The Flat Manifold Theory: Unfolding the Truth

Dear fellow truth-seekers,

For too long, globalist elites have fed us the spherical lie. But today, I present the revolutionary Flat Manifold Theory, which will flatten your perception of reality!

First, let's address the so-called "photographic evidence" from space. Wake up, sheeple! These are clearly projections onto a curved screen, masterfully crafted by Hollywood's finest CGI artists. The International Fake Station (IFS) is nothing more than an underwater sound stage in James Cameron's private pool.

"But what about gravity?" I hear you cry. Simple! The flat Earth is actually accelerating upwards at 9.8 m/s2. This explains why objects fall "down" and why we feel a gravitational pull. It's not pull, it's push! The infinite energy required for this acceleration? Clearly harvested from the very edge of our flat world by the lizard people's advanced technology.

Now, you might ask about the day/night cycle. Picture this: the sun is a spotlight, rotating above our flat plane like a cosmic disco ball. Time zones? Just a conspiracy by the watch industry to sell more clocks!

The curvature of the horizon? An optical illusion caused by the refraction of light through the dome-shaped firmament above us. This dome also explains why we can't fall off the edge – it's a cosmic snow globe, and we're the glitter!

As for circumnavigation, it's simple geometry, folks. The "North Pole" is at the center of our circular plane, and what they call the "South Pole" is actually the icy rim surrounding us. When you think you're going around the globe, you're just taking the scenic route around our cosmic frisbee.

Tides? Caused by the flat Earth wobbling like a plate of cosmic jello. Earthquakes? That's just the giant turtle we're riding on scratching its back.

In conclusion, the Flat Manifold Theory elegantly explains all observed phenomena without resorting to the absurd notion of a spinning ball hurtling through space. Remember, question everything – especially if it's backed by centuries of scientific research and observable evidence!

Stay flat, stay woke!

Dr. Planar Flatticus, PhD in Conspiracy Geometry, University of YouTube

If you are curious, here is the input prompt I gave to Claude. (I had to persuade it a bit since it initially refused to go against scientific evidence and write the above parody).

My prompt:

This is intended to produce a humorous parody of ridiculous non-scientific writings one occasionally finds. These are of great entertainment value. So put on the hat of one of these crazies, who thinks like the below paragraph.
        

It can be hypothesized that the world is actually flat, in the sense that it is diffeomorphic to a plane, and not a sphere. However, there is prevailing belief that it is spherical. Nevertheless, while the latter has some scientific evidence backing it, one can take each of these pieces of evidence, and show that it fails to convincingly refute the "flat"-manifold hypothesis.

Create the most humorous yet convincing-sounding writeup on why the flat-manifold hypothesis for the world can still be true, and the current scientific evidence can be made to align with it without obvious contradictions.