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 don’t care about the technology. I don’t even care if it’s funny. It’s in terrible taste.
If you have a funny standup set, do your routine yourself. If you want funny topical comedy, there are literally dozens of comedians alive today you can watch right now on multiple streaming services and YouTube.
There is no reason to do this other than to be tasteless.
I don’t believe in blasphemy, but if I did, putting words in the mouth of an incredibly insightful genius and presenting it as his words would be blasphemy.
If Carlin himself approved it before dying, I might listen to it. But nope. You said it yourself. Plenty of living talent right now.
They should have done this with the last Norm MacDonald special that he recorded during the pandemic. Use the same words, but put him in front of an audience.
Greed?
I’d call greed being tasteless, but I guess we could count it as a second reason.
Jay Leno bitched that he was annoyed when someone would put on a comedy album for friends, and ‘try to take the credit’ for being funny.
This kind of feels like a logical extension of that.
Well they aren’t trying to pass this off as Carlin’s material. The video starts and ends with a disclaimer saying that it’s an AI generated impersonation.
What if this set was entirely written and performed by a human but in the style of George Carlin? Is that as tasteless?
A little, but not as much as if they were pretending to be George Carlin. I don’t think a disclaimer somehow doesn’t make it tasteless. Imagine it wasn’t Carlin or even a comedian. Imagine if it was, since his day is coming up, Martin Luther King, Jr.? An AI MLK that delivers a speech that is an original speech but similar to one of his, but with a disclaimer that it wasn’t a real MLK. Tasteless? I sure as hell think so.
That makes sense. I think what confuses me about this reaction more than anything is the fact that we’ve had all these different AI recreations of other dead artists that are being met with either a neutral or even positive reception.
I’ve seen a bunch of Kurt Cobain and Chester Bennington songs created by AI where the comments are all talking about how much they love/miss the artist, then this drops and everybody loses their shit.
I would call those equally tasteless. Digital necromancy, as a whole, is a pretty tasteless endeavor with only one exception I can think of- https://fortune.com/2023/10/12/cyberpunk2077-voice-actor-video-game-ai/
I agree with you on that. I do wonder how you would feel if GC had written all the material himself and they used the ai to bring his last planned show to life?
I don’t know because I really don’t think that sounds like Carlin would do. It’s kind of like asking what if the Pope was a Muslim.
Suppose it’s a different comedian then, or entertainer
Not OP but for me, I think it pivots on the permission of those who knew the comedian best and who might be hurt the most by not asking.
Whether AI writes the jokes, some 3rd party, or the comedian themself did, does the family want that out there, or would it be painful for Robin Williams’ family (remember that he killed himself) to watch a computer ape Williams’ comedy? If you’ve had a loved one pass away, would you want to be asked before someone made an AI of them performing jokes? And would it make it better or worse if the AI did an inferior job of replicating the original person?
Even if Carlin had planned a show, if the wishes of the family were that it be performed by Carlin himself or nobody, then I don’t think anyone had the right to turn an AI loose on the material to “give it a shot”.
Beyond that, I wonder if they have the legal right to use Carlin’s likeness, mannerisms, etc.
when you’re dead, you can’t claim your rights are infringed. it might be macabre but what-fucking-ever. don’t watch it if you don’t want to.
I’m certainly no legal expert, but I think it’s the rights of the family that are being infringed upon. I don’t know a thing about the Carlins specific situation, but I think it’s customary for a famous person to leave control of their “intellectual property”, use of their likeness and whatever else, to their next of kin or a trusted friend or someone. And it sounds like the family have those rights, because they’re looking into “what their rights are” (which sounds a lot like “legal options” to me).
I personally think it’s in bad taste specifically BECAUSE the person is deceased - they can’t make the call and go “yeah go ahead” or “I don’t like this, please stop”. Kind of like how someone can’t consent to sex if they’re unconscious (weird parallel, I know).
I feel like the YouTubers are assuming Carlin’s consent, when they don’t really have it. If they’d asked his family, they could have maybe had it. But instead they decided to just go ahead and hope that they can get away with it.
I think Carlin’s daughter has every right to be pissed about not getting asked for her permission, especially if she owns the rights to his material.
> I think it’s customary for a famous person to leave control of their “intellectual property”, use of their likeness and whatever else, to their next of kin or a trusted friend or someone.
it might be common, but it’s utterly immoral.
No, but many still living people can and do consider the fact that a giant media corporation is puppeting a dead man to squeeze the last bit of profit out of him to be more than a little fucked up. Not an infringement of his rights specifically, but IMO an infringement of ethics and decency.