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.
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/