I've been running IRC markov chain bots for ~20 years. In the last couple years I've been running local LLM alongside them. While there are people that still prefer the markov chain bots the majority invoke the LLMs. But maybe that's because I picked the most hallucinate'y, least refusing, most funny models I can (like mistral-7B fine tunes) instead of something smart, locked-down, and low temperature like chatgpt's LLM as a service.
If anything seeing the LLM and markov bots side by side has really reinforced how much of the markov bot "humor" is human perception imposed on chance outputs. The markov's "learning" ability is still far superior though.
I run a markov chain bot in a Twitch chat, has some great moments. I tried using a LLM for awhile, would include recent chat in the prompting but never really got results that came across as terribly humorous, I could prompt engineer a bit to tell it some specifics about the types of jokes to build but the LLM just tended to always follow the same format.
I'm actually not following the model's fine-tuned/desired prompt at all. I am operating in purely pattern completion mode. The first text the LLM sees are alternating lines of input and response examples that look like what it will get getting from the IRC client front end written in the tone I want it to respond and giving some information about itself. Then I just tack the IRC chat history+input onto those example chat pre-prompt lines. Nothing but single lines and newlines with newline as a stop token. No instructions, nothing meta or system or the like.
But that's also configurable by users. They can invoke any pre-prompt they want by a command passing a URL with a .txt file.
I'm not GP, but it's probably not for fun; there's a lot of money in IRC Markov chain bots, but it's too cutthroat of an industry for a hobbyist to last.
If anything seeing the LLM and markov bots side by side has really reinforced how much of the markov bot "humor" is human perception imposed on chance outputs. The markov's "learning" ability is still far superior though.