George Carlin AI comedy special is 'ghoulish' and 'creepy,' his daughter says
George Carlin AI comedy special is 'ghoulish' and 'creepy,' his daughter says
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.
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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.
Those are not incompatible.
Art is subjective, sure. You can dislike a piece of art that took a ton of technical skill to accomplish and still recognize how impressive the technical skill was.
Thank you! This is exactly how I appreciate this piece and people act like they stole something from society by flexing their tech talent for a video.
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.
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.