It's funny as a parody of newspaper articles, but it pretty much just took a "breaking news" article format and stuck in specifics about leaves and trees. Which, again, is pretty funny and I enjoyed reading it, but articles in The Onion are typically much more satirical.

A satire writer would have used this premise to express a point of view. Bad example but if you were critical of climate change predictions you could write something like "Leaf falls from tree. Tree Scientists claim billions more could follow as early as this autumn."

I don't really have a strong opinion on whether an AI can be "creative" but I think the main force of creativity here come from the prompt. Maybe if you instructed ChatGPT to write a satirical article expressing a certain point of view it would be able to synthesize a creative premise? I don't know.

I searched "site:theonion.com leaf falls tree" and found this which is pretty good:

https://www.theonion.com/leaf-hunting-season-begins-18195730...

I thought that ChatGPT was incapable of anything like real humor, but I have been proven wrong.

Australian parody news site the chaser just announced [1] that they are going to put up a paywall to avoid having their content scraped for AI training. They feel like chatGPT already "is a more competent writer of satire than most of the people we’ve worked with". I guess they are too late

[1] https://chaser.com.au/uncategorized/why-the-chaser-is-going-...

This was my first thought as well, I was giggling throughout!