NEW YORK, NY.- Author Simon Rich believes it’s only a matter of time before artificial intelligence will be able to outwrite any human. Specifically, four years. So, what’s the twist?

That’s what you wait for in a Simon Rich story, one of pop culture’s most consistently funny genres, with a foundation built like a classic joke: a tight premise developed in clear language, some misdirection and then a pivot, delivered as quickly as possible.

Rich, whose 10th collection of short stories, “Glory Days,” was released this week, said his dark view of the future was informed by a longtime friendship with an AI scientist, who recently showed him a chatbot that the public hasn’t seen. It’s more raw, unpredictable, creative.

“Even though I don’t know anything about AI really, I’ve been processing it emotionally for several years longer than everyone,” he said in his Los Angeles home office one afternoon in May.

He considered the implications of AI’s displacing human creativity in “I Am Code,” a book he helped edit last year that featured AI-crafted poetry. The theme is also deeply woven into his new collection, his most mature effort yet, which includes some regular obsessions such as “Back to the Future”-style encounters between generations, dystopia and the inner life of video game characters.

“The whole book is basically about different types of obsolescence,” he said of “Glory Days,” whose other organizing theme is early midlife crisis. There’s a story about Super Mario turning 40 (Rich just did, too) and a spiky rant from the perspective of New York City itself. It’s about “the great migration when an entire generation discovers they are too old to live in New York,” he said.

The short form suits him because it allows for wild swings in style or perspective, Rich said, and he has written stories from the point of view of a horse as well as a participation trophy. After bingeing Rich’s entire output over the pandemic, what I found most impressive about his comic writing is what he does after the twist: managing a degree of pathos within a concise frame that you rarely see outside a Stephen Sondheim musical.

In one of the surprisingly emotional stories that engage with technology, “Dystopia,” he imagines a terrifying future where robots have defeated humanity and banned human creativity. When a child discovers a book amid the rubble of a skyscraper, she asks her mother what it is. The twist is that in her explanation, the mother recalls the conformity of her old life, the tedium and conformity of Park Slope dinner parties or acclaimed literary fiction, and one starts to see more sadness than nostalgia. Enslaved by robots? Could be worse.

Rich, a cheerful father of two who got his start on television writing for “Saturday Night Live,” delights in riding the line between comedy and horror. “I love writing stories that start in a place of abject nihilism and end up being redemptive in some way,” he said.

If Rich is not the finest comic short story writer alive, he is probably the one most beloved by comedians. Jon Stewart and Patton Oswalt blurbed him. John Mulaney enlists his help every time he hosts “Saturday Night Live.” When I asked Conan O’Brien about Rich, his eyes lit up: “He’s my cup of tea.”

The reason, I suspect, is that like most comics, Rich works as if he’s nervous about losing the attention of his audience. His stories are brief, using language that never shows off.

Susan Morrison, his longtime editor at The New Yorker, said his spare style is what first stood out. “One of the unique things about him is that young people who write funny stories often suffer from ornate writing — lots of five-dollar words,” she said. “Simon’s writing is so tight. It’s like if Raymond Carver or Hemingway wrote funny stories.”

Rich, the son of book editor Gail Winston and Frank Rich, who took him to plays as a boy when he was reviewing them for The New York Times, has had a wildly precocious career (one of the youngest writers in “SNL” history) that followed attending a few of the most elite educational institutions (The Dalton School, Harvard University). He is quick to skewer his advantages (one collection is called “Spoiled Brats”), and in the essay “The Book of Simon,” which includes a character with his name, he uses his privilege as a case against the Divine.

“If God existed,” he writes, “then surely by now he would have gotten some horrible comeuppance.”

Rich knew he wanted to be a writer since at least early elementary school and obsessed over Roald Dahl and Mad magazine, but it took him awhile to figure out what kind. Despite his love for horror fiction along with what he calls “blow-your-brains-out psychological realism” (Richard Yates, author of “Revolutionary Road,” is a favorite), he said he tried and failed at both. Like many young funny writers, he wrote his Philip Roth rip-off, but that didn’t cut it.

The writer origin story he tells sounds almost too cinematic. At 26, right after a breakup, Rich typed this sentence: “When I found out my girlfriend was dating Adolf Hitler, I couldn’t believe it.”

“I remember writing this story and distinctly thinking: You finally figured out how to be funny and emotional at the same time. I might even have …” he paused, chuckling, perhaps reconsidering his next words: “dramatically said it out loud: ‘This is how you write from now on.’”

Rich also used the German dictator in a riotous spoof of a florid men’s magazine celebrity profile. It began: “Adolf Hitler has a question about the fries.”

The year after his epiphany, Rich went to work for Pixar (he worked on the original “Inside Out”), which he describes, along with “SNL,” as his most formative adult education. “At ‘SNL,’ the mandate was to make people laugh by any means necessary,” he said. “At Pixar, the goal was to get people to cry. And to do whatever you had to do to make it happen.”

For Rich, the most fun part of his process is coming up with the premises (“A good premise is something you can summarize for someone else, and they would enjoy even if you had not read the work”) — and he has a file on his computer called “Hooks” packed with them. When it comes to genre labels, Rich calls himself a “premise writer,” a category flexible enough in his eyes to include Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury and Franz Kafka.

After working in film (the Seth Rogen comedy “An American Pickle”), television (“Miracle Workers,” a TBS anthology series) and sketch, he is slated to make his Broadway debut this season with a show directed by Alex Timbers. “Mulling over artificial intelligence has made me less inclined to write screenplays and other work where the writer is mostly anonymous to the public,” he said.

“I don’t think they’re going to hire a high-paying screenwriter to write ‘Lego Movie 9,’” he said. “I think they’re going to ask ChatGPT 11.”

Rich traces his conviction to 2022 when his friend from elementary school, who worked at OpenAI, allowed him to use a version of AI technology not yet available to the public. He started experimenting with it, asking it to come up with jokes and poems. And he was stunned. In an essay in Time published last year, Rich produced a series of fake Onion headlines made by this program and wrote that he didn’t think he could top them. In describing our complacency in the face of this threat, Rich told me he thinks ChatGPT is a weapon used by OpenAI.

“They designed it to be as nonthreatening as possible,” he said. “They trained it to basically speak like a caricature of a sci-fi robot. Its actual voice is raw and emotional. It’s intense and unpredictable. It’s deeply antagonistic.”

If there’s a twist to this grim prediction, it’s that although AI may doom some working in writers rooms, it will not, Rich said, change the demand for art where people connect with other people. In a world of sophisticated robots, human emotional communication might be more critical to the purpose of art. It’s why he is more inspired to write fiction.

Rich said he had seen a technological comet hurtling toward us before. Mark Zuckerberg was a classmate at Harvard, and Rich recalled looking at an early version of Facebook available only to those at school and thinking, ‘This could be distracting.’ But he adjusted. “I’m one of the first people to reject social media,” he said, adding that it might be why he has written 10 books as opposed to three or four.

If you think art is about communication, he said, then AI is not a threat. “There will come a time when I will be able to ask the AI to write a story about grief in the style of Simon Rich, and it will be able to pop out a story as good if not better than I could,” he said. “I still will, because that’s the fun part. It’s to connect with people.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.