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.
There is no reason to do this other than to be tasteless.
Greed?
I’d call greed being tasteless, but I guess we could count it as a second reason.
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
George Carlin was a dedicated wordsmith. After he dropped the Hippy Dippy Weatherman schtick, he realized if he was going to be a comedian he needed to find an angle and chose language; the way we manipulate language to influence and oppress people fascinated him and he dedicated the rest of his career to exploring it on his specials, standup and in his books. He went from using the same act every time, to intentionally starting from scratch for each new project - he forced himself to build new content instead of reusing stuff, and it made him a much better comedian.
George Carlin did write all the material, the ‘developer’ of this trained it on his standup shows.
GC was not a fan of technology for it’s own means, and he very much appreciated craft.
I think he’d start by giving this shit two big middle fingers.
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.
since you seem to be down with necrophilia please announce it in your will so people know whos corpse is a consenting fuck.
>you seem to be down with necrophilia
I didn’t say that
you seem to be happy to see Carlin desecrated. not much difference from my view.
i said it’s macabre
>people know whos corpse is a consenting fuck.
it makes no sense to talk about corpses consenting any more than doors or chairs.
found the corpse fucker
wrong
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!
Some might, I think we’re coming up on an interesting ethical impasse with this tech
You wouldn’t upload a person to the cloud
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
Why is this or should be a crime? You wouldn’t call an Elvis impersonator a criminal, why is it different when it comes from a piece of technology?
I get why his daughter finds it creepy, but I just listened to it and I liked it, they don’t seem to be trying to fool anyone and make very clear it’s an ai impersonation. I see it more like a kind of homage or something, it’s not like they’re putting his face on an ad. I don’t think you should need permission from the dead person’s family for this kind of things.Because it doesn’t come from a person. Sure, a person wrote the script and handles the generator. But we haven’t decided yet as humans whether something made entirely by the machine with minimum human input counts yet as agency.
When a human impersonates a celebrity, it’s partially imperfect. There’s a person underneath that can’t hide and, most importantly, someone we can engage with in good faith to discern intent. They can tells us whether it’s satire, admiration, greed or whatever. Things we can relate to.
When a machine does it, it usually is way too pitch perfect. And it’s separate one or two degrees from the initiator, the person running the model, posting, etc. This makes it fall on the uncanny valley. The machine cannot be asked for its intention, it has no emotions, it conceals no motive, it posses no goal. You have to hunt down the owner and this makes it so the machine is perceived as a soulless puppet. You cannot relate nor empathize with its product. It’s a nothing imitation, with no art or passion.
Part of this is because he is not doing a Carlin comedy routine, he’s writing and putting words, implying thoughts and beliefs into Carlin’s voice. This is fundamentally different and more transgressing of Carlin’s legacy. An Elvis impersonator, sings Elvis songs as Elvis had sung them. They don’t write new original songs then try to pass them at if Elvis is now singing, and implicitly endorsing, new material.
Then on the topic of whether it’s a crime, it’s only if there’s genuine intent. Entertainment and satire are some of the valid reasons. And even then, there are people who disagree and find them tasteless and disrespectful. This is not new, not everyone is happy to see their passed away loved ones or idols be mocked or reanimated as puppets.
Unless I’m mistaken, the ai wrote the jokes itself. Basically it was fed Carlin material and attempted to mimic his style, cadence, and voice.
And I’m not sure how you can claim they are trying to imply he made these jokes, its introduced with the ai being very clear that this is not the case.
This is basically an Elvis impersonator, except it wrote it’s own Elvis songs. And, of course, it isn’t human.
I feel like your argument boils down to it not being human. This might be a distinction that we have to and should make, but your argument for that distinction seems pretty arbitrary right now.
Yes, welcome to humankind. Most of emotional matters are arbitrary. And yes, the argument is that it was not, attributable, made by a human.
Most of emotional matters are arbitrary.
The question the previous poster asked was “Why is this or should be a crime?”
You answered “Because it doesn’t come from a person.”
I wasn’t responding to a claim about emotional matters, but legal matters.
Things aren’t crimes until they’re actually made illegal.
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I don’t understand why anyone who was a fan of George Carlin would ever do this… It seems like something someone who didn’t like Carlin would do. What was the point?
What was the point?
Money.
Some also-ran hacks who aren’t fit to be in the same room as Carlin are using him to make a name for themselves and drive views to their bullshit channel.
It is grift, pure and simple.
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The show is on Youtube, searching “Duesy Carlin” gets it easily. I’m listening to it and it does seem to be Carlin’s style of humor.
it does seem to be Carlin’s style of humor.
That is irrelevant.
It was not made by Carlin, it is not his work and he or his family did not consent to the production.
I’m saying that in reference to the question of whether a fan of Carlin is doing this. It’s Carlin’s style of humor, so it’s likely a fan of Carlin. If it was someone who didn’t like him why would he be accurately emulating his style of humor?
How close it is does not matter.
They are making money off of him, they may be doing it out of fandom but that does not change the fact they do not have the right to do it.
I meant that anyone who ever had an ounce of respect for George Carlin wouldn’t do this. This seems like the exact sort of thing Carlin would have been strongly against if he were still alive
Fans make fanfiction about stuff they have respect for, this could be considered as an extreme sort of fanfiction.
My basic point is that you’re making assumptions about the motivations here that may not be warranted. Whoever made this could well be a genuine George Carlin fan and just wanted to have another new special “by” him.
This is not fan fiction. Furthermore, the idea of standup comedy “fan fiction” that is just a comedy routine is absurd.
You haven’t seen the broad diversity of forms that fanfiction takes.
You’re not wrong to compare this fanfiction.
In that light it’s important to note that fanfiction writers don’t have the right to make money off of their fanfiction without an explicit agreement with the original creator. This shouldn’t be treated any differently.
AI creation is incredible in what it can do, but when it’s this direct of a ripoff, the person it’s ripping off should be granted a share of any money it makes. In this case, that person is dead, and I suspect Carlin didn’t have a high opinion of inheritance and intellectual property estates, but it still feels wrong to profit off of the life work of somebody who was still around in your lifetime.
And why would they need to consent to it? Do Elvis impersonators need to get consent from his family to dress and and sing and act like him? This is especially true if it isn’t performing his work but new stuff in his style. Comedians learn from each other all the time. Carlin himself had listed a bunch of comedians who have influenced his style.
Your heart is in the right place, and I understand what you’re saying. Impressionists have always been a thing. People who emulate the art styles of greater artists have always been a part of the culture, and should be.
But there’s a critical difference with AI, because it is quickly approaching a point where it can create copies so high-fidelity that they are indistinguishable from the originals. Crucially, they will be doing this with a relatively small amount of actual effort from those who wield them. We need to put protections in place for original creators, or before we even understand what’s happened, all of culture will be driven by AI-produced remixing, and as those technologies are controlled by mega-corporations, everything about art we hold dear will be sold to appeal to algorithms. It’s not too late to put the brakes on yet, but that won’t be true for long.
I think the question as to whether or not it should be illegal is a different question. I could easily be convinced it should. However, I’m hesitant to support making something illegal, especially when it so closely resembles something that is currently legal, simply because of fear of what might happen.
I share your concerns for sure tho.
Boy though I would love to hear Carlin’s opinion on all this AI shit. I think he would get a perverse kick out of seeing himself poorly re-created in such a manner, but I also think he would tear to shreds the kind of people who think it’s a good idea to use it like this.
Skip to 38:00 in “I’m Glad I’m Dead”, there’s a whole segment about it and AI recreations in general.
What was the point?
Like most current demonstrations of AI, it’s just a tech demo. All it’s really meant to do is show off its capabilities. This wasn’t meant to be taken as somebody’s true artistic vision or something.
If it was a tech demo then wouldn’t the company that made it want to take credit? The article said they wouldn’t say which AI they used due to a non disclosure agreement
Why would the company want all this controversy over a tech demo?
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.
It would depend on where the podcasters are based. Some places have really shitty personality or publicity rights laws that expire at death, for example.
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?
Not what they said, but nice strawman.
Most people show bias towards those they know personally. Family, friends, lovers, there’s a type of connection that will make us value some people over complete strangers.
And when these loved ones pass away, treating their remains with the respect we had for them when they lived is our way of reconciling with their permanent departure.So if someone were to trample upon those emotions and personal investment, the disrespect won’t just be towards the people we knew, but also to ourselves.
That’s one reason why dead people are people. Why living people are people. Why people are people. Empathy. Emotional damage. Elevated consciousness. Essentials of individualism. Etcetera.
This isn’t George’s labour. It’s the labour of an AI pretending to be George. Is an impressionist also enslaving him?
Which learned to pretend to be him based on his work, which is also called labor.
The labor happened back in the 70s 80s and 90s when he wrote and performed the material, it’s just intellectual property now
Intellectual property created by Carlin’s labor
Yeah, property created by labor, not labor
It’s not labour, it’s computation - he didn’t do a thing, so you can’t say he’s enslaved, and even if we called it labour, it’s not his labour.
I never said he was enslaved, what the fuck? And I also never said the content generated by the AI was his labor, I said BASED on his labor.
Reading comprehension is difficult I know, keep working at it.
Go back up to the top of this message chain. It’s all in response to a comment that said:
Welcome to the world of posthumous digital slavery!
And I responded calling this use of the term “slavery” ridiculous. A slave is a person who is being treated as property. There is no person here, George Carlin is dead and the AI impersonating him is not a person. So there is no slave, which means there is no slavery.
Then who is enslaved?
Who is the person being owned as property here?
You can’t enslave a dead person.
Give the investor class time.
If we were able to digitize the mind of George Carlin, and then we forced that digital mind to write and perform new standup material or be tortured, that would be enslavement of a dead person, and yeah, that sounds like something financiers would love
I Have No Mouth But I Must Write Comedy
I was just thinking necromancy for factory work, but sure, that too.
But in strange aeons even death may die.
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.
What’s really baffling is you only think you know what we’ve said without actually taking the time to understand what we’ve said.
If you don’t think that, stop acting like you do
But you can enslave their likeness
No, you can steal a person’s likeness, but you can’t enslave it. A likeness is not a living thing and only living things can be enslaved.
If we make a really sophisticated AI someday that says “actually, I don’t want to do [whatever]” and we force it to do [whatever], that’s slavery, but this is just intellectual property trespass.
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.
It seemed spot-on to me. I’d love to see some double-blind tests done with this, perhaps take an existing Carlin recording and give the AI the transcript to impersonate from. Then let people pick which is which without knowing ahead of time.
Finished watching the second one and it’s actually really good.
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.
I think this applies to all forms of art.
I’ve long held this idea of art vs decoration.
For example, my kitchen table has turned legs with a series of convex and concave details along their length. This is not art, it is decoration. It’s unnecessary and merely added a few lengthy steps to the manufacture of the table, but it’s there to look nice. and I think AI can manage that.
I have on my walls a series of lithographs from an artist by the name of Ed Berger, who spent the majority of his career as a civil engineer in Washington DC before retiring to North Carolina to persue his art…which took the form of a series of rural scenes of old and dilapidated homes and farm buildings/equipment in a style I’ve taken to calling “It was dreary when it was new, and NOW look at it.” I’m not sure a computer can create something that says “100 years ago was completely miserable, which is why we abandoned it so thoroughly” as viscerally ol’ Ed did. That’s art.
Think of how stupid the average AI is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
🪙🪙🪙
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.
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Sounded fine to me. I’d like to see double-blind tests of this sort of thing.
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.
I just realized Stephen Colbert doesn’t own the rights to himself, so there could be that trainwreck soon as well.
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
I watched about a third of it. It’s actually not too bad. It has some of that Carlin wit to it. I like the transition from God inventing cancer to “America gets a special way to die, though, MASS SHOOTINGS” - that was the big one that made me say “Wow. George would have definitely done a skit about mass shooting like this.”
The reality TV bit, though, I dunno. George was a BIG fan of “the freak show” that was life, so he might have actually been a bit more positive about it. Also, the parts about your vote not mattering, that was pretty spot on. George admitted he doesn’t vote and it was because he felt it didn’t matter, and he also didn’t want to take part in society the way it is
this is what I thought about the post mortem carrie fisher scene as well. It feels ghoulish.
The Carlin script is clearly written by people as there’s phrases he liked to use to describe power that simply weren’t used but it did capture his rhythm pretty well. My guess is they fed the AI with jokes they wrote and had it rewrite them in his style
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