Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Nate Parker | TV | January 11, 2024
George Carlin was a unique voice in American comedy. Cynical, with a profound understanding of the human condition and deep empathy. Savagely and often scatalogically funny, but never losing sight of the bigger picture. He defined the comedic principle of punching up and his “Seven Dirty Words” comedy routine, for which he was arrested seven times, helped defang the pearl-clutchers and the FCC’s draconian hold over what society considers acceptable language. His rants on capitalism, abortion, gun control, and the religious right are as prophetic and relevant today as they were decades ago. He meant many things to many people, so it should come as no surprise that tech dweebs are trying to ruin that too.
George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead, which I won’t dignify with a link, was released on Tuesday by “comedy AI” Dudesy. It “hosts a podcast” - quotation marks are going to get a real workout in this piece - with Mad TV alum Will Sasso, who should really know better. The hour-long special was generated after all Carlin’s material was fed into an algorithm, which spat out the results before being paired with deeply disturbing AI “art.” This act of data collation mixed with copyright piracy is described less accurately by the algorithm at the beginning of the special.
“I just want to let you know very clearly that what you’re about to hear is not George Carlin. It’s my impersonation of George Carlin that I developed in the exact same way a human impressionist would. I listened to all of George Carlin’s material and did my best to imitate his voice, cadence and attitude as well as the subject matter I think would have interested him today. So think of it like Andy Kaufman impersonating Elvis or like Will Ferrell impersonating George W. Bush.”
Not to get obsessed with pronouns or restate the obvious, but there is no “I” here. There’s no person or mind to impersonate, develop, listen, imitate, or think like George Carlin. Every word in the statement is a mistruth. That hasn’t stopped publications like Forbes from crowing that “George Carlin Lives On” and describing the special as though it comes from the man himself. Carlin’s daughter Kelly didn’t mince words in her statement on Twitter.
“My statement regarding the AI generated George Carlin special: My dad spent a lifetime perfecting his craft from his very human life, brain and imagination. No machine will ever replace his genius. These AI generated products are clever attempts at trying to recreate a mind that will never exist again. Let’s let the artist’s work speak for itself. Humans are so afraid of the void that we can’t let what has fallen into it stay there.”
Simple and profound; her father would be proud. He’d also be both exhausted and furious that today’s comics are so lazy they can’t even be bothered to steal his work themselves. Carlin’s humanity is the core of his material, and it’s something software can’t replicate no matter how many corpses they virtually exhume. Apparently there are questions about how much “Dudesy” is an AI algorithm and how much is a computer-generated voice repeating words written by Sasso and his partner Chad Kultgen. The pair insist the AI is real, however. Decades ago the acronym GIGO was created to describe how the data entered into a computer system determined the results - Garbage In, Garbage Out. That’s changed with the advent of generative AI, as its developers steal work from every artist whose work is available digitally, from Picasso to Carlin. Now it’s Genius In, Garbage Out. Somehow, that’s worse.
