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this whole article is an excellently constructed sneer. the more detail I hear about Dudesy (what a fucking name) the more sure I am this is exactly the kind of shitty, hollow grift I pegged it as when I first read about it:
As a product, Dudesy is a deeply depressing attempt to flog technology as magic, where two desperate comedians have their chemistry and flow regularly interrupted by a deeply unfunny third comedian masquerading as an AI. The voice of Dudesy may indeed be AI-generated, but I would wager a human being is either writing or heavily editing a script. 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.
what I want to know is this:
When you remove the artifice of “Dudesy, the entertainment AI,” Dudesy as a podcast becomes something far more grim — two comedians awkwardly riffing with a disembodied voice, all with the chemistry of two people being held hostage by a contract they deeply regret signing. The podcast has also struggled to retain its initial momentum, with viewership tumbling from 160,000 views on the first episode to around 40,000 an episode for the last 9 months, with the exception of the George Carlin special which sits at 55,000 views at the time of writing.
this stupid fucking special didn’t even do the numbers of some of the niche YouTube channels I watch. its subreddit is absolutely dead, with 961 peak users and barely any posts. how is it that so many folks who watched this garbage and liked it found our last thread on lemmy of all places and felt strongly enough about the Carlin special to post and occasionally lie about it? even assuming the new sort gave it a gigantic boost as a popular thread on a small instance, this shit doesn’t make sense to me.
how is it that so many folks who watched this garbage and liked it found our last thread on lemmy of all places and felt strongly enough about the Carlin special to post and occasionally lie about it? even assuming the new sort gave it a gigantic boost as a popular thread on a small instance, this shit doesn’t make sense to me.
I think you know the answer, my guy. AI flunkies will search for and latch onto any opportunity to hype AI, especially if its a niche online forum. I mean it definitely wasn’t Dudesy fans, they are in short supply.
haha you’re right, I was hoping one of those shitheads would take the bait and do a “how dare you I’m not a shill, you’re the shill” post for our enjoyment. no such luck now that the cat’s out of the bag on how shitty the Carlin special was though.
I don’t have a suite of advanced analytics (and a lot of the analytics available for lemmy use methods I disagree with) but my admin eyes have been seeing an increase in this type of posts recently. I don’t keep up with reddit anymore, but I don’t think anything’s happened that’d increase lemmy’s organic userbase by a noticeable margin. most likely some brainless hypebros have discovered that lemmy’s the ideal size: big enough to be an audience, but small enough that their bullshit won’t get shouted down. in short, expect more MBA dropouts to get banned for undisclosed advertising
One thing I value on lemmy compared to reddit is that it’s not a flat user namespace. If a commenter doesn’t have an account on this instance they’re kinda sorta automatically on probation, reputation wise. Far from it that I’d downvote someone who doesn’t have an account… but let’s just say they start with a lower prior.
oh absolutely. it’s very easy to shit on a thread and run from a federated account (which is also why we ban shit stirrers quickly — it’s a hostile network out there), but an account with a track record gets much less harsh treatment in case of any problems because they’ve shown they’re capable of making good posts, and we don’t really want to punish anyone for something that’s relatively minor weighed against their post history. a local account gets a (minor) leg up on that track record, because the user behind it has at least introduced themselves during registration and gone out of their way to get an account here. local accounts also stand out more from a moderation perspective, so the reputation of those users tends to grow quicker too.
Shit, are you insinuating we’re actually making good posts here? I’m going to have to severely drop my game!
Yeah, the nature of federation and “oh, just glance at their activity in other places with other norms” is extremely handy here, even if it does occasionally lead to regretful realisations of what you just saw on somesuch history
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.
