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.’

  • veee@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    I’m not concerned so much about comedians being impersonated than I am about politicians making guest appearances in political ads suddenly saying/supporting untrue things.

    • LWD@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      On the bright side, the prevalence of deepfake technology might end the blight of revenge porn on society, since it might eventually get impossible to tell whether the photo or video was manufactured.

      Not the brightest of bright sides, but hey.

  • Jordan117@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    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.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      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

  • Lunatech@infosec.exchange
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    8 months ago

    @L4s I will not comment on the ethics of this, but I will say that if I had heard this without being told it’s AI generated (and the do tell you, at the start and again at the end) and if I didn’t know Carlin was dead, I would easily have believed it was him doing this bit. Now I was never a big Carlin fan (I pretty much only heard what could be played on the radio, and most of his stuff didn’t fall into that category) so maybe someone more acquainted with his material would have noticed differences, but to me it was a scary good impression of him.

    I have to wonder if the daughter doesn’t like it because she realizes that she’s (I assume) still getting some small amount of payment when people buy his older stuff, but as much of his material was topical I’m guessing those payments are ever diminishing, and she may fear that AI impressions of him will diminish the sales of his older stuff even further. Either that, or possibly it’s unsettling to her that a machine could come that close to making a spot-on impression of her father. I guess if someone created an AI of my dad saying things that he never actually said when he was alive, I would also find it somewhat unsettling and maybe even a little creepy.

    I’d also be interested to know exactly how much of the creativity behind this (the script) was created by the AI and how much work there was on the part of humans to make it sound natural. I get that AI can make the audio, that’s pretty much a given now, but where did the script come from?

  • Arkaelus@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    This must be the absolute epitome of this AI replication poor taste… The person who thought it would be a good idea to do this with Carlin, probably the one human who hated human bullshit more than anyone else to have ever existed, is either so out of touch they don’t even vibrate at the same frequency as the rest of existence, or so far up their own ass that they’re staring at their pancreas… An absolutely disgusting move.

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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      8 months ago

      so out of touch they don’t even vibrate at the same frequency as the rest of existence, or so far up their own ass that they’re staring at their pancreas

      What gets me is the creator says they “studied” Carlin in order to match his style. Imagine consuming Carlin’s entire body of work and still somehow thinking this was a good idea…

      • not_woody_shaw@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I’m guessing they started with Carlin to get all the fuss out of the way up front, so they can get on with doing all the others with minimal outcry.

  • DLSantini@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    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.

  • Chakravanti@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    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.

  • Nusm@lemmy.zip
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    8 months ago

    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.

  • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    I met Kelly Carlin once. She is an awesome human being and cares a lot about her father’s legacy.