AI-Generated George Carlin Drops Comedy Special That Daughter Speaks Out Against: ‘No Machine Will Ever Replace His Genius’::Stand-up comedian George Carlin has been brought back to life in an artificial intelligence-generated special called ‘I’m Glad I’m Dead.’
No one cares if it’s right or wrong … absolutely no one cares what anyone thinks about any of it, about ethics, morals, respect or rights.
All anyone cares about is how much money it’s going to make.
We should install a turbine onto Carlin’s coffin because he’s probably spinning so fast right now, he could power New York City.
This has happened with the estates of famous people for a long time. It didn’t start with the current trend of deep learning systems.
Tupac’s estate has mined every single little recording he did and pressed it to an album. Gene Roddenberry’s notes got turned into two series (Earth: Final Conflict and Andromeda), both of which started pretty good and slowly degraded over time. The Tolkien estate was held back by Christopher for a long time, but now he’s gone, the remaining heirs are happy to rake in the cash, and they’re being thoughtless about what they greenlight (like the Gollum game) (oh, and there’s only about 20 years for them to keep the copyright, which isn’t that long; Peter Jackson movies were about 20 years ago).
Franz Kafka instructed all his unpublished manuscripts be burned when he died. GRRM has instructed that even if he doesn’t finish A Song of Ice and Fire before his death, it will not be picked up by another author to finish. These are wise people.
A notable exception would be Robert Jordan and his Wheel of Time series. He prepared notes so someone could finish the work and his widow picked Brandon Sanderson to finish the series. But I think it feels easier to milk it than to be thoughtful with the life’s work of someone, as this requires a lot “would he have liked it” and to know this you would have to start caring early.
This is in very poor taste.
I met Kelly Carlin once. She is an awesome human being and cares a lot about her father’s legacy.
Does she own the rights to his work by chance?
This is some kind of bad joke right?
That or a lot of very, very bad jokes
I’m not here to rage about the whole human vs machine thing because I honestly don’t give two shits. However, this isn’t very good. The pacing feels like George Carlin, but that’s about it. It’s really more like an edgy Ryan Reynolds.
I disagree. It’s actually pretty good. Hopefully some people will be outraged enough to actually listen to it.
The joke structure is 100% Carlin’s. The delivery is almost perfect. The message is spot-on.
As someone who’s consumed every album and special George Carlin produced, it felt like someone retelling their memory of some of his bits. Like regurgitation. It’d be impressive if your nephew performed this at his thirteenth birthday party after becoming obsessed with Carlin.
it felt like someone retelling their memory of some of his bits. Like regurgitation.
That’s because that’s exactly what these are. They don’t create new things. They use and modify existing work.
They being the writers of the joke, which are humans. The AI part is only imitating George Carlins voice and cadence.
Oh, well that changes a lot. I assumed it was AI generated jokes. The people writting the jokes should just tell it themselves. What’s the point of using Carlin’s likeness?
Could be they are not good at telling jokes, or they wanted to use material that are more associated with George Carlin rather than them. I don’t know.
IMO, using AI voices is funnier when you make them say things the real person would never say, so I don’t see the appeal of imitating someone.
It’d be impressive if your nephew performed this at his thirteenth birthday party after becoming obsessed with Carlin.
Given modern generative large language models are still about a decade away from a thirteenth birthday, this is pretty impressive then.
Does anyone remember the Seinfeld AI generation in 2022?
Do we really think this tech is going to stop here and not improve at all after such rapid growth in the past two years?
By the time of its thirteenth birthday I suspect it’s going to have gotten much better at writing jokes.
See, I disagree. Someone retelling their memory of some of his bits, or your nephew performing at his birthday party would be telling old George Carlin jokes. This was new material and was topical, which I think is cool. It’s hard to know what George would really think about today’s climate, but I can’t imagine it would be too far off from the this.
Was it perfect? No. But if I know what it is going in, I can sit back and just enjoy it for what it is - entertainment.
Agree. It was fun to hear. The bit around 37 mins about what it’s like being dead was fun
The bit about AI Bill Cosby made me laugh the hardest. “You get all of the Cosby jokes with none of the Cosby rapes!”
Of course they can’t. But they can and will exploit every single word he’s ever said. Then exploit every idiot who gives said AI product and sense of their attention.
Gotta be a dick here though. If they listen to the honestly lying charade running now then they didn’t hear him when he explained the first time.
It sounds a lot less like George than I expected.
It’s his voice… But holy shit you’re right. It didn’t sound like him at all.
This is bullshit, and it’s bad for you.
Stupid future run by stupid, greedy fools
I listened to it and it’s genuinely not bad (on a content and voice synthesis level), to the point that I have a hard time believing it was entirely AI-generated. If it’s not a fake ghostwritten by the creators, it must have been heavily rerolled and edited to make it so coherent.
I listened to it and it’s genuinely not bad
Of course not. Its predicated on the collected works of a decades-long professional comedian.
If you re-mixed a new screenplay using the combined works of Shakespeare (and called it, idk, West Side Story or 10 Things I Hate About You or The Lion King) you could put together a blockbuster movie fairly easily, too.
If it’s not a fake ghostwritten by the creators, it must have been heavily rerolled and edited to make it so coherent.
The rise of ‘pseudo-AI’: how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots’ work
“Mechanical turk” jobs are way more hellish than any realistic AI dystopia, even though some AI developments use MTurks
Fully agree. There’s absolutely no way his whole bit about guns was generated from an LLM, while including the tangent about Japan. There had to have been a significant amount of leading prompts to get it to that point. At which point, whoever developed those prompts gets (at least partial) credit as a writer
Senior Prompt Engineer
This is so tragicomedically the opposite of everything that Carlin was about in so many ways that it’s difficult to fully comprehend
If someone tried that with bill hicks we’d all end up in the matrix in a year.
AI can’t smoke cigarettes. So. We’re saved.
Yet.
Y’know, I was a pretty big Carlin fan, I had a few of his albums and even saw him live in concert once. I listened to the whole thing while driving, and I thought this was okay. It’s obviously not George Carlin, but it sounded a lot like him, and I can imagine he would approve of many of the jokes. It wasn’t a laugh-a-minute, but I did get lost in it a couple of times and forget that it wasn’t really him, and I did laugh out loud a few times as well. (The joke about the best comedian for AI being Bill Cosby got me!)
Carlin’s comedy was very topical, which doesn’t always translate to today, so having new, up-to-date Carlin bits are actually cool. I can understand his daughter’s apprehension, but at least people are talking about her dad again, so I would think that’s a good thing.
People never stopped talking about her dad. This junk isn’t the boost to the real Carlin’s place in pop culture some are painting it as.
Why do all of the comments make it seem like people think that someone asked chatgpt to write a George Carlin routine or whatever? A human person, not a computer, wrote some comedy in (what they felt) was in the style of George Carlin. The technology portion of this was the cloning of Carlin’s voice to “perform” the routine. And you can feel however you want about either part of that. I mean, seems like you’d have to be pretty far up your own ass to think you can just put your own words into the mouth of someone else, especially someone who is no longer in a position to call you a fucking idiot, or not. But the story that people are commenting on, sure seems to be quite different to the actual events that occurred.
As far as the actual story, they know what they did. They know full well that they could have actually did a Carlin impersonation if they had wanted. They could have written their material, went up on stage, said exactly want they were doing, performed their bit, dressed up for the part, hitting as many of the mannerisms as they could. A real, actual, proper attempt at an impersonation. They could have done that, and almost no one would have cared. A few people might have been upset about it, as there always are. But largely, no one would have batted an eye.
But they didn’t do that. They did this. They did this, knowing full well that the claim of it being an “impersonation” was bullshit. And knowing full well what the response would be. And it was exactly the response they wanted. All of the attention and outrage they are getting directed at them right now? That was the point.
Honestly he’s a fairly offensive choice as a first target for this sort of venture, but I haven’t watched the thing yet. Doesn’t seem likely it’ll be full of the cutting political satire we associate with him, and the jokes I’ve seen posted from it are tepid af.
