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 watched it and it was pretty good. Yeah, it’s not the same as the real George Carlin but a few of them certainly got be chuckling and resembled reusing his past work in today’s context. The video did start off prefacing that this was an AI and not truly George Carlin so nobody would be fooled that it’s not actually him.
It doesn’t sound at all like him and the laugh track is just the insult cherry on top.
I was thinking it kinda did, but kinda didn’t, and I couldn’t put my finger on why. Someone in another post nailed it for me. Whoever made this used all of George’s stand up specials to train the AI on his voice and cadence, so George of course sounded young in his early work and old in the later ones. The AI mixed that together, so you get a voice that’s not quite his younger voice and not quite his older voice either. That made perfect sense to me why it sounds like George, but still a little off.
“Carlin” also makes references to his deceased not-really-Carlin state throughout the show, so if you crop off the preface it still wouldn’t fool anyone for long.
Edit: there’s a whole section of the special starting at the 38 minute mark that’s about being dead, and “Carlin” reflecting on what exactly he is and what that means. Just got to that bit, it’s rather good.