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’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.