fine
Explanation
The Joke
The comic presents a short prose passage written in the sparse, minimalist style of Ernest Hemingway. A woman delivers pizza to a man's door. She says "You know, I can deliver more than just pizza." He thinks to himself, "It would be a fine thing to do. A damn fine thing." The passage reads exactly like a Hemingway short story -- terse, understated, loaded with subtext about desire barely contained beneath simple words.
The caption below reads: "The best thing about AI will be generating Hemingway novelizations of porno." The joke is that AI text generation could be used to render the cliched setup of a pornographic scenario in the literary voice of one of America's most celebrated authors.
The Humor
The humor operates on multiple levels. First, there is the inherent absurdity of applying Hemingway's Nobel Prize-winning literary style to the most cliched pornographic premise imaginable (the pizza delivery scenario). Second, the passage is a genuinely good Hemingway pastiche -- "A damn fine thing" is pitch-perfect Hemingway diction, which makes the contrast with the source material even funnier. Third, the comic satirizes both the lofty promises people make about AI's potential and the reality that much of technology's actual use gravitates toward pornography. The joke implies that for all the grand visions of AI, this is what people would actually do with it.