I’m not sure what to do with much of this anymore.

From The AV Club we have a piece entitled “Today feels like a good day to ignore dumb AI stunts and watch the real George Carlin”. No, it is not a happy read. These are frontiers that should not be explored

A pertinent quote:

Earlier this week, “news” broke that quickly caused a lot of people to disregard Paul Anka’s classic advice on monsters (and whether you should give them the precious, life-giving attention that they crave): The announcement that some folks (including, bizarrely, former Mad TV star Will Sasso) had fed a bunch of routines from late stand-up comedy legend George Carlin into an AI and caused it to shit out an hour of “stand-up” presented in a digital facsimile of Carlin’s voice.

No, this is not good. WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS? The man has a corpus of work that is defined. Trying to create continuing adventures that appropriate his voice and likeness is sacrilege.

There was coverage in Variety as well that I missed. This detail was a key point that bothers me:

The hour-long special, which dropped on Tuesday, comes from Dudesy, a comedy AI that hosts a podcast and YouTube show with “Mad TV” alum Will Sasso and podcaster Chad Kultgen.

Dudesy? There is an AI named Dudesy? It isn’t as if the coverage in Polygon gives any inkling as to what model the thing is running on. I found something on HuggingFace that claims to be a stand-up comedian’s assistant but not a standalone model to run rampant. The folks at The Register did find that there is statutory law in Tennessee about using AI for things like this but that may not be the most helpful thing at the moment.

If this is any indication of what may be coming, nobody is going to know what is real or not as we head into the 2024 presidential campaign. That’s going to be dangerous. Life is horrifying when it starts to resemble a John Ringo novel.