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.

  • FaceDeer
    1•11 months ago

    You were saying something about labor, which had been brought up as part of some kind of justification of this being “slavery”. Pons_Aelius wrote:

    Slavery is the ownership of a person as property, especially in regards to their labour. - The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary

    So all this “labor” stuff you jumped in on was indeed part of the slavery discussion. People were arguing about whether this was somehow extracting labor from George Carlin against his will, despite him having been dead for over a decade. When people continued discussing the slavery issue, you responded:

    I never said he was enslaved, what the fuck?

    Which suggested you had no idea what had happened in the earlier part of the conversation leading to this point. I tried to explain it to you.

    At this point I have no idea what else you’re trying to argue. I’ve given you as full a recounting as I can, if you’re still confused about what’s going on you’re on your own.

    • @EmpathicVagrant
      1•11 months ago

      You read way too much into my original comment, and decided to make an entire tangent about it. All I said is that the new stuff was trained by his old work, implying at most that the estate should be given a percentage.

      If you wanted clarification on that you could’ve asked instead of putting terms in my mouth.

      • FaceDeer
        0•11 months ago

        The original comment was two sentences long. There wasn’t much else to read in there.