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.
Standup comedy is meant to be relatable, the best standup material makes fun of the writer’s real experiences and/or common experiences of the audience. This is just my hot take, but I think an AI writing standup comedy is and always will be completely soulless because the AI has never experienced anything and is just putting words together that it doesn’t even know the significance of, and is doing so purely based on the statistics of how real human standup uses those words. Even with AI acting out standup written by humans, they still don’t understand what they’re saying and the emotions they supposedly show are still based on statistics. If you find AI standup funny, you have that right, but I personally don’t and that’s just me.
I think this applies to all forms of art.
I’ve long held this idea of art vs decoration.
For example, my kitchen table has turned legs with a series of convex and concave details along their length. This is not art, it is decoration. It’s unnecessary and merely added a few lengthy steps to the manufacture of the table, but it’s there to look nice. and I think AI can manage that.
I have on my walls a series of lithographs from an artist by the name of Ed Berger, who spent the majority of his career as a civil engineer in Washington DC before retiring to North Carolina to persue his art…which took the form of a series of rural scenes of old and dilapidated homes and farm buildings/equipment in a style I’ve taken to calling “It was dreary when it was new, and NOW look at it.” I’m not sure a computer can create something that says “100 years ago was completely miserable, which is why we abandoned it so thoroughly” as viscerally ol’ Ed did. That’s art.
AI standup is like when a kid repeats a joke they saw on The Simpsons without realising it’s a joke about sex.
When I was small I used to think the name Ben Dover was funny because it sounded like Bend Over, without realising it was “bend over and take a dick up the ass”. Grownups would get mad at me for making an inappropriate joke, even though that wasn’t my intention.
AI doesn’t know when it’s making an inappropriate joke either. That’s why AI Seinfeld got in trouble for saying transphobic hate speech. It was just mimicking comedians like Ricky Gervais without understanding. Like a kid.
It’s like that episode of King of the Hill where Bobby is copying black comedians’ racial humour and it isn’t funny because he’s white. His dad tells him to tell jokes from his own culture, so Bobby hops on Google to look for white people jokes and gets pointed to aryanbrotherhood.com. He tries his new material at a standup club and nearly gets beat up for being a Nazi. He didn’t understand a single joke he told that whole episode, and it’s exactly the same for AI language models. They don’t know what they’re saying.