George Carlin AI comedy special is 'ghoulish' and 'creepy,' his daughter says
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.
This isn't George's labour. It's the labour of an AI pretending to be George. Is an impressionist also enslaving him?
Which learned to pretend to be him based on his work, which is also called labor.
The labor happened back in the 70s 80s and 90s when he wrote and performed the material, it's just intellectual property now
Intellectual property created by Carlin’s labor
Yeah, property created by labor, not labor
the product of labor is still labor, just qualified
Property is not labor. "I put a fence post in this ground 80 years ago so now any crops you grow here are mine" is
bullshitdangerous reasoning thatonlyusually serves to enrich the capitalist class at the expense of people doing labor.e; now with less tilt
you playing word games by calling the product of his labor "property" doesn't change the fact that it is labor.
nor do childish insults.
I'm sorry if I come across like a pedantic ass (e; and I'm sorry I got a little tilted with my last comment), but I think this is a really important distinction and each of these things needs separate rules to build the kind of society we want to live in.
It was labor when it was written and performed, and that labor should be respected and fairly compensated, but once we cross the threshold from writing and performance to recordings of those performances and copies of writings we're talking about intellectual property. I don't think you should be able to make commercial use of other people's intellectual property without their permission, but I think that's a civil lawsuit type of problem not a crime (whereas stealing someone's labor, whether through wage theft or through actual chattel slavery, should be considered a crime, imo). If we don't keep those distinctions clear, corps like Disney and EA are going to use protections we have (or should have) for people's labor to attack anyone they can claim are messing with their brands.
I've got a lot of respect for Carlin and think this project was a bad idea in bad taste and the wishes of his family members ought to be respected, but I don't want to see an emotional outrage tip us into making dumb laws.
see, now you're arguing opinion, not fact, and while you're welcome to your opinion regarding what is and is not "labor"-- i disagree. a bunch of mental gymnastics and moral equivocation while further splitting hairs does not a convincing argument make.
the product of labor is still labor.
Oh, of course, I forgot that the difference between "property" and "labor" were quantifiable objective things and not just agreed upon social consttucts that have evolved over time, how silly of me to lapse into discussing my opinions! /s
Oh well, let this be my reminder to never give a rhetorical inch when arguing on the internet
i'm glad you learned your lesson about the difference between property and labor, and the mistake of giving ground and still expecting to win.
Poor thing, it's you who should have to learn something
Right, @gAlienLifeform is playing word games, not the guy who's arguing that impersonating a dead guy is equivalent to "slavery."
when you accuse me of things i never said, that's all the proof necessary that you're arguing in bad faith.
Follow this subthread back up to the top, that's what this is all about. Someone called this "posthumous digital slavery" and I called them out on the ridiculousness of calling it "slavery." All this quibbling about what "labor" means is part of an attempt to justify using that ludicrous term. Maybe you should pay more attention to which side of an argument you're jumping in on before arguing so vigorously for it?
it sounds like you’re the one who should pay more attention and follow that thread back up an hit reply there instead of accusing me of saying something someone else said and argue with them instead.
lol
I did hit reply there. I wrote the first response to the comment that called this "posthumous digital slavery." That was me up there. I've been here from the beginning.
It's not labour, it's computation - he didn't do a thing, so you can't say he's enslaved, and even if we called it labour, it's not his labour.
I never said he was enslaved, what the fuck? And I also never said the content generated by the AI was his labor, I said BASED on his labor.
Reading comprehension is difficult I know, keep working at it.
Go back up to the top of this message chain. It's all in response to a comment that said:
And I responded calling this use of the term "slavery" ridiculous. A slave is a person who is being treated as property. There is no person here, George Carlin is dead and the AI impersonating him is not a person. So there is no slave, which means there is no slavery.
Respond to the person using the term, not me.
I'm explaining why the conversation that you joined is about slavery. You were confused about why that was the topic so I'm pointing out that it was the topic before you joined. You should probably read the upstream comments when you join a conversation in progress to find out what is going on.
And I didn’t drive the conversation to the term nor restate it myself. I’m not confused at all, you can try and misguide someone else if you must insist on that. You came up implying I used the term and can cease your nonsense. If you have issue with a term, address the person using said term. Everyone in a conversation aren’t a hive mind which is why I asked and continue to ask that you respond directly to the person using rhetoric that you have issue with.
You didn't drive the conversation to the term because it was already there. That's what it was about when you joined in.
If you don't want to talk about "digital slavery" then don't join a conversation about it.
I added something else in my comment, not everything downstream has to be about supporting the same ideas and rhetoric. There’s this thing in conversation where each person contributes from different angles and relevant commentary.
Unlike verbal conversation, you can have multiple people commenting directly to the top person. I won’t sit and explain how comment threads work but you can go to the comment you’re mad about instead of the latest person down the line.
Wonders of technology.
You were saying something about labor, which had been brought up as part of some kind of justification of this being "slavery". Pons_Aelius wrote:
So all this "labor" stuff you jumped in on was indeed part of the slavery discussion. People were arguing about whether this was somehow extracting labor from George Carlin against his will, despite him having been dead for over a decade. When people continued discussing the slavery issue, you responded:
Which suggested you had no idea what had happened in the earlier part of the conversation leading to this point. I tried to explain it to you.
At this point I have no idea what else you're trying to argue. I've given you as full a recounting as I can, if you're still confused about what's going on you're on your own.
You read way too much into my original comment, and decided to make an entire tangent about it. All I said is that the new stuff was trained by his old work, implying at most that the estate should be given a percentage.
If you wanted clarification on that you could’ve asked instead of putting terms in my mouth.
The original comment was two sentences long. There wasn't much else to read in there.
Then who is enslaved?
who used the term?