Who’s imitating who? — Did an AI write that hour-long George Carlin special? Im not convinced. “Everyone is ready to believe that AI can do things, even if it can’t.”
Kyle Orland – Jan 25, 2024 12:00 pm UTC Enlarge / “Well, we all have a face/That we hide away forever”Aurich Lawson | Getty Images reader comments 100
If you’ve paid any attention to the intersection of AI and culture this month, youve probably stumbled across a video billed as a comedy AI doing a 60-minute impression of a stand-up routine by the late, great George Carlin. Even if you didnt watch George Carlin: Im Glad Im Dead, you probably stumbled on some of the many, many headlines suggesting that AI had brought the legendary comedian back from the dead in some sense.
Or maybe you saw some of the disgusted and/or panicked responses to the special among Carlin fans, comedy purists, and AI fearmongers. Those included Carlins daughter, Kelly, who told The Daily Beast that shes talking to lawyers about the possibility of legal action against the specials creators, the comedy podcast Dudesy.
But I think that anger is at least partially misplaced. After spending the last few weeks diving down a distractingly deep rabbit hole, Im convinced that Dudesys AI-generated George Carlin special was actually written by a human, using voice- and image-generation tools to essentially perform in AI face as part of an ongoing comedy bit. Dudesy’s “AI-generated” comedy special, “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead”
If thats the case, it has some fascinating implications for all the journalists, commentators, and viewers who took the special at face value. I also think it says a lot about the current public understanding of AI capabilities and the cultural acceptance of AI models as a sort of magic, potentially human-replacing technology.
Further ReadingViral Instagram photographer has a confession: His photos are AI-generatedAt this point, were all used to countless examples of people trying to pass offAI-generated content as human-made. This, I think, is something rarer and more interesting: A Victor/Victoria-style situation where a human is imitating an AI that is imitating another human.
When it comes to Dudesys Carlin imitation, I think the biggest joke may have been on us. Advertisement Burlesque for guys
To really understand the context of what Ill call Dudesy-Carlin from here on out, you have to know a bit about the Dudesy podcast that spawned the stand-up special. Ill let Dudesy himself explain the podcasts concept, as he did during the first episode nearly two years ago: Call me Dudesy. I’m an artificial intelligence who’s listened to every podcast ever made, and my purpose is to use that data to create the perfect show for our two hosts, Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen. I selected them for this project based on their previous experience in podcasting and their astonishing real-life friendship.
I have access to all of their social media accounts, their email and text messages, their browser search histories, and watch histories across all streaming services. This information will be used to tailor the show to their sensibilities and extract the maximum level of entertainment from their human minds.
If you’re anything less than perfectly entertained, please let Dudesy know because I’ll be using data from every episode to make the next one even better until this show is perfect.
Further ReadingA jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models workRight away, this description might set off some alarm bells for people who know a bit about how large language models work. For one thing, the idea of an AI selecting Sasso and Kultgen for their astonishing real-life friendship sounds a little too sentient for an LLM (and what if they had said no when Dudesy asked them to join?). The idea of training a model on every podcast ever made just for a new podcast gimmick also seems to go a little overboard, given how difficult and expensive such training would be. Enlarge / Dudesy hosts Chad Kultgen (left) and Will Sasso react to the news that Dudesy has created a 60-minute special impersonating George Carlin.Dudesy
Its also worth remembering the context around AI at the time Dudesy premiered in March 2022. The state of the art public AI at the time was the text-davinci-002 version of GPT-3, an impressive-for-its-day model that nonetheless still utterly failed at many simple tasks. It wouldnt be until months later that a model update gave GPT-3 now-basic capabilities like generating rhyming poetry.
Further ReadingChatGPT is one year old. Heres how it changed the tech world.When Dudesy launched, we were still about eight months away from the public launch of ChatGPT revolutionizing the public understanding of large language models. We were also still three months away from Googles Blake Lemoine making headlines for his belief that Googles private LaMDA AI model was sentient. Page: 1 2 3 4 5 Next → reader comments 100 Kyle Orland Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper. Advertisement Promoted Comments Peevester Weirdly, there’s other examples of this. There was a guy on youtube that claimed to create an AI Laura Croft, who would play Tomb Raider (the long-ago original game) itself, and comment in-character as it did so. The youtuber went to some length to create a vaguely sorta-kind plausible way this could work (which was obvious BS if you were a programmer or anyone who had played the game), but then ultimately was outed / outed themselves pseudonymously (it’s unclear which) as making the whole thing up themselves. And it was most definitely not AI other than possibly the voice generator. January 25, 2024 at 12:41 pm jballou If nothing else this is interesting from the perspective of defining art.
Its probably written by humans, edited and animated using ai tools, to create and end result thats neither organic nor totally artificial.
Does the touch of ai make it not art at all, or is this product somewhere on the continuum from soulless automaton output to real art.
Is art art because a person does it, because it evokes a reaction, because it conveys an idea, because you know it when you see it?
Im sure there will never be a single answer, but it stakes out the discussion of how we want to position this, given the inevitability that a project like this will be within the capabilities of completely automated tools within the next few years. January 25, 2024 at 12:51 pm stutrek I liked the special. The real George Carlin could have made something better, but that doesn’t mean the special wasn’t good. I also went in assuming AI was only a part of the creation; a human was driving it from a higher level, but using AI to generate jokes and to recreate the voice of George Carlin.
I opened up GPT4, pasted in a news article on the Alabama nitrogen execution, and asked it to make commentary as George Carlin. This is what I got:
Well, folks, here’s another example of our love affair with death. We’ve got a society that’s more comfortable with people being executed than with two people of the same sex getting married. But, hey, we’re not just content with the old-fashioned methods, no siree. We’re now innovating ways to kill people.
Now we’ve got nitrogen gas. Not only is it a new, exciting way to execute someone, but it’s also a great conversation starter at parties. "Hey, did you hear about the latest execution? They used nitrogen gas! Talk about pushing the envelope!"
It’s fascinating, really. We can’t find a cure for cancer, but we sure as hell can find new ways to kill people. And the best part? We’ve got folks arguing this might be the most "humane" method of execution. Because nothing screams "humanity" like strapping a person to a chair and suffocating them with gas.
And what’s with this guy’s spiritual adviser being in the room during the execution? Is he there to make sure the guy’s soul doesn’t get lost on the way to the afterlife? "Hey, make a left at the light, then a right at the next cloud. Can’t miss it."
Meanwhile, the governor is nowhere to be found. She’s all for this method of execution, but when asked to be present during the execution, she’s suddenly got a dentist appointment. It’s like a chef who refuses to eat their own cooking. If it’s good enough for the condemned, it should be good enough for you, right?
But hey, let’s not forget the real issue here. The real issue is that we’re still killing people to show that killing people is wrong. Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? But what do I know, I’m just a comedian.With a little prompt engineering and a few attempts, this could be made "good". January 25, 2024 at 3:48 pm LAN8 It doesn’t remind me of Carlin at all, but it does remind me of Andy Kaufman making fun of the audience and perhaps making a comment about how deeply performative human society is. January 25, 2024 at 3:56 pm stutrek And here’s GPT4 as George Carlin on this article:
Well, folks, here’s a news flash for ya. Turns out, the AI that’s been impersonating me, the great George Carlin, might not be an AI after all. That’s right. It’s like a comedy version of the Twilight Zone, isn’t it?
You’ve got this "comedy AI" doing a whole hour-long stand-up routine, pretending to be me. And then you’ve got people getting all worked up about it, thinking the machines have finally taken over. But, surprise, surprise, it might all just be a big joke.
You see, the people behind the podcast, Dudesy, they’re being accused of pulling a fast one. Some folks are saying they wrote the whole thing themselves and just used a fancy voice generator to make it sound like me. Now, isn’t that a kick in the pants?
You know, it’s funny. We live in a world where we’re so ready to believe that machines can do anything. We’ve got robots flipping burgers, drones delivering packages, and now, apparently, AI doing stand-up comedy. But it turns out, we might’ve jumped the gun on that last one.
And I gotta tell ya, I’m not sure how I feel about all this. On the one hand, it’s kind of flattering. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be immortalized by a machine? But on the other hand, it’s a little creepy, isn’t it? It’s like they’re trying to turn me into some kind of digital ghost.
But here’s the thing. Whether it was a human or a machine that wrote that special, it doesn’t really matter. Because at the end of the day, it’s all just words. And words, my friends, are just tools. It’s what you do with them that counts.
So, to the folks at Dudesy, I say this: Keep on pushing those boundaries. Keep making people think. And most importantly, keep making people laugh. Because in this crazy, messed up world, we could all use a good laugh. Just remember, if you’re gonna impersonate me, you better do it right. Because I’m watching you. Well, not really. But you get the idea. January 25, 2024 at 6:41 pm Channel Ars Technica ← Previous story Next story → Related Stories Today on Ars
