Amongst the sludge of AI-powered everything at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show, a robbery took place. “Dudesy —” allegedly a “comedy artificial intelligence” with its own podcast — put out an hour-long “impression” of George Carlin, in which it had “listened to all of Carlin’s material” and “[done] its best to imitate his voice, cadence and attitude, as well as the subject matter [it] thought might have interested him today.” The special was created without the permission or blessing of Carlin’s family, with his daughter Kelly saying that “
Many on the Dudesy Reddit believe that it’s entirely made up, with some suggesting that even the Carlin special was written by Kultgen. I definitely think that generative AI was used here, because even though it’s crap, there is somehow a great deal of it.
Maybe it’s time for me to see the world and update my priors on this but I haven’t seen evidence of a generative AI constructing a joke. Based on that evidence, if the special (which I have not seen and refuse to see) contains jokes, I would imagine it was mostly written by human, with maybe some assistance to pad it out to an hour of material. Either way, fuck the whole thing.
Maybe it’s time for me to see the world and update my priors on this but I haven’t seen evidence of a generative AI constructing a joke. Based on that evidence, if the special (which I have not seen and refuse to see) contains jokes, I would imagine it was mostly written by human, with maybe some assistance to pad it out to an hour of material. Either way, fuck the whole thing.