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 0

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 0 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 Channel Ars Technica ← Previous story Related Stories Today on Ars