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.’
fightin’cryin’fuckin’dyin’
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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.
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.
If someone tried that with bill hicks we’d all end up in the matrix in a year.
I met Kelly Carlin once. She is an awesome human being and cares a lot about her father’s legacy.
This is some kind of bad joke right?
That or a lot of very, very bad jokes
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Franz Kafka instructed all his unpublished manuscripts be burned when he died.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.
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.
Literal ghouls.
Fuck whoever did this. That podcaster… Wtf ever. I couldnt even finish reading the article. I am seething with rage at this so hard I’m shaking. I hope the creator of this abomination gets sued so badly, their great grandchildren curse their name because of the inherited debt.
Fucking asshole.
This is hilarious; everyone saying Carlin would hate this is essentially putting words in his mouth just like Dudesy did, but Dudesy put a lot more effort in.
No, they’re just extrapolating what someone’s feeling on something might be. That’s pretty different than creating an entire comedy special using the voice of a dead guy.
But what does the dead guy have to say about it?
Nobody knows, but he’d probably hate it. I certainly wouldn’t want to put any words in his mouth, then use a computer program to imitate his voice so it seemed as if he were saying those words.
I feel like as an anti capitalist (on the outside) nihilist anarchist insane fuck the world comedian, who is dead, he can’t care. If his daughter can’t sue then this is a circle jerk. When I die what my arrangements take care of is as much as I can control, after that who gives a fuck. I personally think he’d laugh his ass off.
“No Machine Will Ever Replace His Genius”
OK, but it’s the closest that we can get at the moment.
Why do we need to get closer at all? He lived, gave us a ton of laughs that we can still enjoy, and died. Leave it at that.
Maybe some enjoy this new content, why gatekeeping?
@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?
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.
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.
