Massive George Carlin fan, am I understanding this right?
- A human being wrote all new fake-Carlin material
- He then used A.I. to help his voice sound like George?
The computer did not write the act, right?
“Sacrosanct” seems like a snarl word here. If it’s not, what exactly do you mean by it?
Yep–and stuff like that annoys a lot of folks. It’s part of what inspired this thread:
I’m not at all a fan of people posting that sort of thing, and I sure hope it doesn’t become any more common, for much the same reason as I hope people don’t start asking their third graders to write limericks about random topics and then posting those limericks on the board.
I’m not sure what you mean by snarl word, but the relevant definitions for sacrosanct from Merriam-Webster:
1 : most sacred or holy : INVIOLABLE
2 : treated as if holy : immune from criticism or violation
Almost all of this thread has been about “how dare they try to impersonate George Carlin” rather than on the actual quality of the content.
I’m somewhat familiar with the other thread and found it a bit misguided. Yeah, we were probably having a bit too much fun playing with the new ChatGPT toy and needed to reign it in, but AI generated content is only going to become a bigger topic for discussion going forward. Being reflexively anti-AI content isn’t going to do us any favors, either.
Then I believe I’ll start yelling, because the future you describe sounds terrible and I want no part of it.
Not by my understanding. It’s been about the ethics of impersonating without his (or his estate’s) permission. You seem to be saying that objections to saying it’s ethical are based wholly in religious ideas. That’s obvious a ridiculous thing to say, which is why I asked you to clarify what you meant by sacrosanct.
Your posting of the dictionary definition doesn’t exactly make it look better.
Again: there’s no “anti-AI” position that isn’t “reflexive”? Like, it’s impossible to have principled stands against its use?
Your terms of discussion are fatally flawed.
You do understand that George Carlin would absolutely, without a question, 100% LOATHE his name and likeness being exploited this way, right?
I think people focused on the third-party aspect of this example are missing the point to some extent.
Perhaps Kelly Carlin is a principled person–I couldn’t say. But every famous dead celebrity has an estate to manage their likeness and everything else. And at least some of them are going to realize that they can keep the money flowing by using just this sort of AI recreation.
Digital recreations are already happening of course, like in the case of Carrie Fisher. AI will just make it much easier and allow far more involved recreations.
Beefing up laws/enforcement against cases like the OP isn’t going to change the big picture at all, because these estates still own all those rights to the material and likenesses, and they will be highly motivated to monetize them further. Even when they are managed by closely connected family members today, that doesn’t last forever. Kelly Carlin doesn’t appear to have kids, so when she dies the Carlin estate will pass to non-family. And there’s a good chance they won’t feel quite as strongly about the situation as her.
Arguably, the laws we need aren’t against third parties, but about these estates. If we think that people shouldn’t have their likeness used without their consent, this kind of thing should be illegal by default (especially for those already dead). That’s where all the money is going to be at.
I highly doubt this. Carlin was never a ‘topical’ comedian; he rarely discussed politics or societal fads. Instead, it thought deeply about human motivations and the ways in which people use rationalizations (or in his words, “soft language”) to avoid acknowledging uncomfortable truths. As much as he was a great comedian, he was a practical semanticist delving into the meaning behind ostensibly meaningless use of casual language. Beyond the offense of stealing both Carlin’s material and (a poor imitation) of his vocal character, it also dilutes his incisive cognation into the hypocrisy of society into a droll commodification of overused comedy tropes, complete with generated laugh track.
There are actually valuable use cases for generative AI that might actually be of some modest value albeit not worth the money invested in training models. Instead, it seems to be mostly used to generate uncritical essays, false news blurbs, and wholly fictitious citations; produce bizarre and unsettlingly wrong illustrations; generate ‘deep fake’ images and videos; provide confidently wrong authoritative results to questions of fact; and grind out completely uncreative ‘content’ suitable for providing a 24 hour stream of unrefined pablum for the masses to suck down like a sewage slurpee. I’m sure George Carlin would have something sagacious to say about that, and the people who promote it that no stochastic parrot could replicate.
Stranger
Don’t forget the fart jokes!
These don’t seem like they’re in conflict. On the contrary. I don’t know if Carlin ever used the words “euphemism treadmill,” but that’s exactly what he was talking about in his bit about shell shock/battle fatigue/operational exhaustion/PTSD, among other routines. Euphemism treadmills are often explicitly political (the very phrase “politically correct” usually refers to words that have come to replace previous ones) and faddish (any given word on the treadmill has a finite lifetime, starting as inoffensive and ending up as yet another pejorative).
I think part of it is that we conceive of music as an independently existing work of art—there’s a piece of music that has been composed, and the only way to bring it to an audience, for the longest time, was to perform it (you can’t visit a piece of music in a museum as with a painting or a sculpture), and a single performer or interpreter can’t spread it to every audience. So there’s a piece of music ‘out there’ after its creation, waiting to be called into being at some given locale via its performance.
But with comedy, it’s much more closely tied to the person, to being somebody’s opinions, outlook, view on life. That’s not as easily separated from an individual as a piece of music is; so any re-instantiation seems like an attempt to duplicate or fake another person, yielding a sort of uncanny facsimile. Compare this to jokes: those are much more readily transferable, and indeed, there have been instances of different comedians telling (variations of) the same jokes. But as soon as you include an individual perspective on the world, the act and the one performing it don’t come apart as easily.
I need to circle back to this, because it presents an opportunity to demonstrate that there’s a major difference between artists taking inspiration from their predecessors and what AI is doing.
This is a Cthulhu Mythos short story that I wrote about eight years ago.
Feel free to stop and read it. I’m rather proud of it and it hasn’t been read by as many people as have read some of the other stuff I’ve written.
I wrote this story because of a dream I had about a massive hole full of millions of dead bodies, where criminals were executed by being pushed in alive. It was a particularly vivid dream and it lingered in my head after I woke up and I realized I wanted to make it into a story, and while I was brainstorming it I came up with the idea to do an H.P. Lovecraft pastiche - Lovecraft is one of my favorite authors of all time, both for his unique brand of cosmic horror and for his unique antiquarian prose, I’ve long wanted to write something in his style, and Lovecraft himself often used dreams as inspirations or set stories in a “dreamland” beyond the world we know. I’m rather happy with how it came out, and people who’ve read it have told me I did a great job of emulating his style and genre. (Maybe too much so, because in word count it’s about 1,000 words longer than the Lovecraft story I most closely took inspiration from.)
All of that took two things which an AI cannot reproduce; creativity and effort. It took an original moment of inspiration, the desire to create something based on that inspiration, a familiarity with how and why our culture tells stories the way it does so as to properly pace and lay out the narrative, and a love for a particular style of story sufficient to craft an addition to its genre.
Maybe in 2024 I could’ve opened up Grok and typed in “Write a short story in the style of H.P. Lovecraft about a giant hole full of dead bodies” and it would’ve produced a narrative that fits that description, but it wouldn’t have been a worthy tribute to Lovecraft in the way mine is. An LLM does not have the capacity for creativity. It does not understand why humans tell stories, or what a story is, or even the meaning of the words that go into it. All it knows is that certain words are associated to certain other words in certain ways, and that a given sequence of those words will produce a satisfactory response to a prompt, and even then it doesn’t “know” that in the same way a human being does because it is not conscious and has no self-awareness of its own existence.
Moreover, I know that if Lovecraft saw my writing, he’d be OK with it, because he welcomed fellow “weird fiction” authors like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth to borrow from his stories when they saw an idea they liked. Anyone who thinks that George Carlin would be OK with someone using a computer to make him say things he never said clearly wasn’t paying attention to any of his routines.
Truly you are All Man and All Wit.
Pretty much agree with your analysis - its more or less the position I settled on as I tried to articulate the question.
When people do someone else’s comedy routine or well-known jokes it only seems allowable if its a recognised classic - e.g Four Yorkshiremen - and done as a homage, so original authorship is acknowledged right from the start.
Four Yorkshiremen? Our local theater could only manage two! Just two Yorkshiremen to entertain fifty children in a thirty-seat auditorium, tuppence a child admission of which they got five percent with which to pay to have the thinnest of roofs over their heads…
I’m going to go old fart here and ask why this generation can’t produce it’s own George Carlin instead of trying (very badly) to resurrect him from the grave. If you want a more updated version of George Carlin then become a comedian with something to say like George did.
Don’t get me wrong, I do like when artist do new versions of old songs in their own style. Thats art. However, recreating new material and pasting someone’s name on it is just wrong. Copyright laws should be enforced here.
The issue I see in the future is that some AI machine may just start generating this type of material on its own because it perceives that this is what people want because it gets views. Whom do you sue then for your copyright violation?
Maybe I’ll be glad when I’m dead too! 
Indeed. But does that mean that an AI Rodney Dangerfield would be appropriate?
Which was itself inspired by Stephen Leacock’s short story “Self-Made Men.”
Okay, you raise a good point.
I suspect this has less to do with today’s youth calling for the wraith of George Carlin to make sense of the world and far more to do with someone wanting to showcase their AI and “I made George Carlin” gets many more clicks than “I made LaughBot 3000”
If its getting a significant amount of clicks past just curiosity it means that people want or accept an updated AI George. Especially if people watch the entire thing and then watch a second one. We will see.