A new comedy special starts with the quote, “I’m sorry it took me so long to come out with new material, but I do have a pretty good excuse. I was dead.”
The voice sounds like comedian George Carlin, but that would be impossible, as Carlin died in 2008. The voice in the special is actually generated by an artificial intelligence (AI).
“This is not my father. It’s so ghoulish. It’s so creepy,” Carlin’s daughter, Kelly Carlin-McCall, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
The YouTube account Dudesy, which is described as a podcast, artificial intelligence and “first of its kind media experiment,” released the hour-long special on Jan. 9. CBC reached out to the producers of Dudesy and its co-host Will Sasso for comment, but did not get a response.
Sasso and co-host Chad Kultgen say they can’t reveal the company behind the AI due to a non-disclosure agreement, according to Vice. The channel launched in March 2022.
Carlin-McCall said the channel never reached out to the family or asked for permission to use her father’s likeness. She says her father took great pride in the thought and effort he put into writing his material.
I don’t care about the technology. I don’t even care if it’s funny. It’s in terrible taste.
If you have a funny standup set, do your routine yourself. If you want funny topical comedy, there are literally dozens of comedians alive today you can watch right now on multiple streaming services and YouTube.
There is no reason to do this other than to be tasteless.
I don’t believe in blasphemy, but if I did, putting words in the mouth of an incredibly insightful genius and presenting it as his words would be blasphemy.
If Carlin himself approved it before dying, I might listen to it. But nope. You said it yourself. Plenty of living talent right now.
They should have done this with the last Norm MacDonald special that he recorded during the pandemic. Use the same words, but put him in front of an audience.
Jay Leno bitched that he was annoyed when someone would put on a comedy album for friends, and ‘try to take the credit’ for being funny.
This kind of feels like a logical extension of that.
Well they aren’t trying to pass this off as Carlin’s material. The video starts and ends with a disclaimer saying that it’s an AI generated impersonation.
What if this set was entirely written and performed by a human but in the style of George Carlin? Is that as tasteless?
A little, but not as much as if they were pretending to be George Carlin. I don’t think a disclaimer somehow doesn’t make it tasteless. Imagine it wasn’t Carlin or even a comedian. Imagine if it was, since his day is coming up, Martin Luther King, Jr.? An AI MLK that delivers a speech that is an original speech but similar to one of his, but with a disclaimer that it wasn’t a real MLK. Tasteless? I sure as hell think so.
That makes sense. I think what confuses me about this reaction more than anything is the fact that we’ve had all these different AI recreations of other dead artists that are being met with either a neutral or even positive reception.
I’ve seen a bunch of Kurt Cobain and Chester Bennington songs created by AI where the comments are all talking about how much they love/miss the artist, then this drops and everybody loses their shit.
I would call those equally tasteless. Digital necromancy, as a whole, is a pretty tasteless endeavor with only one exception I can think of- https://fortune.com/2023/10/12/cyberpunk2077-voice-actor-video-game-ai/
I agree with you on that. I do wonder how you would feel if GC had written all the material himself and they used the ai to bring his last planned show to life?
I don’t know because I really don’t think that sounds like Carlin would do. It’s kind of like asking what if the Pope was a Muslim.
Suppose it’s a different comedian then, or entertainer
Not OP but for me, I think it pivots on the permission of those who knew the comedian best and who might be hurt the most by not asking.
Whether AI writes the jokes, some 3rd party, or the comedian themself did, does the family want that out there, or would it be painful for Robin Williams’ family (remember that he killed himself) to watch a computer ape Williams’ comedy? If you’ve had a loved one pass away, would you want to be asked before someone made an AI of them performing jokes? And would it make it better or worse if the AI did an inferior job of replicating the original person?
Even if Carlin had planned a show, if the wishes of the family were that it be performed by Carlin himself or nobody, then I don’t think anyone had the right to turn an AI loose on the material to “give it a shot”.
Beyond that, I wonder if they have the legal right to use Carlin’s likeness, mannerisms, etc.
when you’re dead, you can’t claim your rights are infringed. it might be macabre but what-fucking-ever. don’t watch it if you don’t want to.
I’m certainly no legal expert, but I think it’s the rights of the family that are being infringed upon. I don’t know a thing about the Carlins specific situation, but I think it’s customary for a famous person to leave control of their “intellectual property”, use of their likeness and whatever else, to their next of kin or a trusted friend or someone. And it sounds like the family have those rights, because they’re looking into “what their rights are” (which sounds a lot like “legal options” to me).
I personally think it’s in bad taste specifically BECAUSE the person is deceased - they can’t make the call and go “yeah go ahead” or “I don’t like this, please stop”. Kind of like how someone can’t consent to sex if they’re unconscious (weird parallel, I know).
I feel like the YouTubers are assuming Carlin’s consent, when they don’t really have it. If they’d asked his family, they could have maybe had it. But instead they decided to just go ahead and hope that they can get away with it.
I think Carlin’s daughter has every right to be pissed about not getting asked for her permission, especially if she owns the rights to his material.
> I think it’s customary for a famous person to leave control of their “intellectual property”, use of their likeness and whatever else, to their next of kin or a trusted friend or someone.
it might be common, but it’s utterly immoral.
No, but many still living people can and do consider the fact that a giant media corporation is puppeting a dead man to squeeze the last bit of profit out of him to be more than a little fucked up. Not an infringement of his rights specifically, but IMO an infringement of ethics and decency.
Carlin-McCall said the channel never reached out to the family or asked for permission to use her father’s likeness.
I smell a lawsuit incoming.
I hope so. It’s so evil to do this without permission.
Evil is a concept created by bronze age illiterates. I don’t see how that has anything to do with this.
Lmao. Evil didn’t exist before 3000 BC? Non sequitur post of the year.
Interesting concept. I watched the first 10 minutes or so. The video goes to great lengths to clearly describe that this is neither Carlin’s voice or jokes. The material is roughly George Carlin-ish, but not great. The AI voice is not quite believable either.
It’s not really for me, and also not a crime in my view. Just a weird thing someone did.
Honestly it came off on the level of a pretty decent impressionist. Not quite on Carlin’s level, but evocative enough of his patter and sensibility to make me wish it was the real thing, and there were moments in it where I could almost pretend that it was.
Man, I miss Carlin.
Standup comedy is meant to be relatable, the best standup material makes fun of the writer’s real experiences and/or common experiences of the audience. This is just my hot take, but I think an AI writing standup comedy is and always will be completely soulless because the AI has never experienced anything and is just putting words together that it doesn’t even know the significance of, and is doing so purely based on the statistics of how real human standup uses those words. Even with AI acting out standup written by humans, they still don’t understand what they’re saying and the emotions they supposedly show are still based on statistics. If you find AI standup funny, you have that right, but I personally don’t and that’s just me.
Think of how stupid the average AI is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
🪙🪙🪙
Carlin-McCall said the channel never reached out to the family or asked for permission to use her father’s likeness.
Welcome to the world of posthumous digital slavery!
When a person dies, anyone can do what ever they want with their image and life’s work.
Calling this “slavery” is ridiculously overly-emotive. You can’t enslave a dead person.
Slavery is the ownership of a person as property, especially in regards to their labour. - The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary
I think the term is accurate.
They are using his image and work to create something new without his consent or the consent of his family.
A dead person is not a person any more. An AI voice emulator is certainly not a person.
Read that first sentence again, out loud. Around your family members.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here. Are you saying you think dead people are people?
Your idea that personhood is singularily defined by a physical body with a heartbeat is strange to say the least.
So you’re saying that this simple voice emulator is actually a person?
I’m gonna keep a record of your opinion and consult it at the time of your death. We’ll see if you still feel the same when I show you my… Necrofile
…okay? Knock yourself out.
Thanks! You know, the most difficult thing about enslaving the dead is dealing with terrible work ethics. Always laying down on the job.
The dead can’t be enslaved. This is a voice emulator, not a person. It’s baffling that I’m now talking to two people who think this is actually George Carlin somehow.
But in strange aeons even death may die.
We really need stronger restrictions on AI usage.
Only for corporate use. Leave the people doing fun non profit parody things alone. Its the people doing this…or stealing someones likenesses to sell a product that need to be regulated
We need but not for this, I would prefer restricting governments and corporations from using it to spy on people.
Why can’t we have both?
The conversation shouldn’t be about restrictions as much as it should be about compensation. AI “art” like this only exists by ripping off original artists.
Yea, we totally should let corporations protect us.
Government restrictions 🙄
We need the puppets of the corperations to protect us.
Cynicism.
Corporations are creations of government. They can be brought under government control.
Might need a new government though lol
But it’s the governments the ones using AI for the most evil things. Impersonating a dead comedian is a pretty benign use in my opinion.
Which government? Where I live that’s still a synonym for corporation.
China probably, America sure as fuck won’t lol
Ah, yes, the CCP. Don’t you have Uyghur genocide to apologize for or something, tankie?
Compare Xinjiang province with Gaza if you want to see how fucking stupid the genocide claims against China are, and yet the same countries are defending Israel as it commits open genocide before our eyes. The lies are so fucking obvious at this point, do you not have any shame?
Also, CPC you fucking dork. Communist Party of China. CCP is redscare bullshit meant to make people think of the CCCP lol
Did you know more than one genocide can be happening at once in the world? Surprising, I know!
Fucking tankies. Operating literally on a child’s understanding of the world.
… what
I just realized Stephen Colbert doesn’t own the rights to himself, so there could be that trainwreck soon as well.
I watched it and it was pretty good. Yeah, it’s not the same as the real George Carlin but a few of them certainly got be chuckling and resembled reusing his past work in today’s context. The video did start off prefacing that this was an AI and not truly George Carlin so nobody would be fooled that it’s not actually him.
It doesn’t sound at all like him and the laugh track is just the insult cherry on top.
I was thinking it kinda did, but kinda didn’t, and I couldn’t put my finger on why. Someone in another post nailed it for me. Whoever made this used all of George’s stand up specials to train the AI on his voice and cadence, so George of course sounded young in his early work and old in the later ones. The AI mixed that together, so you get a voice that’s not quite his younger voice and not quite his older voice either. That made perfect sense to me why it sounds like George, but still a little off.
“Carlin” also makes references to his deceased not-really-Carlin state throughout the show, so if you crop off the preface it still wouldn’t fool anyone for long.
Edit: there’s a whole section of the special starting at the 38 minute mark that’s about being dead, and “Carlin” reflecting on what exactly he is and what that means. Just got to that bit, it’s rather good.
This was honestly funnier than most comedy specials I’ve watched on Netflix.
Did AI write the content or only impersonate the voice?
Either way, it worked at making me laugh. It didn’t even need to be “George Carlin”, and it would have been just as funny as just some old guy complaining.
its honestly good
1% george carlin Ai is better than most Ai
he absolutely hand wrote the jokes but had to use technology for the voice it seems. ithink
deleted by creator
Stuff like this makes me think we’re witnessing so many crimes that we don’t have a names for yet.
You wouldn’t download a person!
Eh, I think this is just intellectual property right infringement with a side of being an insensitive dumbass and not really that new. Like, how is this any different than someone dressing up in a George Carlin costume and doing their George Carlin impression for an hour? Shouldn’t be using George Carlin’s name to sell your stuff, but it’s not like anyone got enslaved or he dug up Carlin’s corpse or anything.
e; I’m not sure if this detail changes anything, but did the AI write these jokes or just do the voiceover work? I was under the impression that it just did the voice and another human wrote the material
So it’s boomer humor? Wow, who would have thought.
I’m sorry, but all the reactionary anger is absurd! This is a fucking beautiful work of art. The publisher didn’t pretend to make this anything more than an obvious AI impersonation and people are acting crazy in response. The jokes were on point and the voice was a little off, but it was a fun experiment.
No. This is not a “fucking beautiful work of art.” This is mediocre comedy put in the mouth of a dead genius.
If you want a fucking beautiful work of art, here’s 58 of them: https://www.discogs.com/artist/435995-George-Carlin
I’m not saying the standup is genius. The experiment is! If you ever worked with LLMs or reinforced machine learning, you don’t recognize the talent of the poster. This was not produced with off the shelf commercial products, the creator did a nice job creating a mediocre stand-up, using tech genius.
I still don’t find it genius, I find it tasteless.
I LOL’d on more than one occasion. I am at conflict with the lack of permission, but I don’t disagree that it sounded like Carlin.
This will be considered a work of art in ten years and the people who down voted will wonder how their customer service role got replaced.
The people who hate AI or rather LLMs and machine learning, are the same people who were against color television or radio. I don’t mind the down votes, history will mock these types as well.
