George Carlin AI Special Eviscerated By Late Comedian’s Daughter: ‘No Machine Will Ever Replace His Genius’
AP Photo/E. Pablo Kosmicki/file
Prudent people who don’t wish to invite evil spirits into their lives know to avoid doing certain things. Saying “Beetlejuice” three times. Watching the cursed videotape from The Ring. Attempting to recreate comedic genius George Carlin through AI.
But Dudesy podcasters Chad Kultgen and Will Sasso seem to have no problem incurring massive levels of bad karma. The two recently released a one-hour YouTube special titled George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead, in which an AI-generated Carlin voice tackles current topics like school shootings and tech billionaires.
As Rolling Stone’s Charisma Madarang described it, the “result” was “an eerie revival of the legendary comic,” with the special being careful to explain at the beginning that “what you’re about to hear is not George Carlin,” but an artificial digital product that was programmed by “listen[ing] to all of George Carlin’s material and [doing] my best to imitate his voice, cadence and attitude as well as the subject matter I think would have interested him today.”
Carlin, who passed away in 2008 of heart failure at the age of 71, had a long career that included creating such legendary comedic monologues as the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” hosting the premier episode of Saturday Night Live in 1975, five Grammy awards, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and multiple Emmy nominations.
Unsurprisingly, the AI Carlin might be able to adequately mimic the sound of the late comedian’s voice, but fails to capture Carlin’s wide-ranging comedic brilliance. A sample, quoted from Variety’s coverage of the controversial special:
“If you’re tired of seeing Jeff Bezos fly to space in his cock rocket, stop using Amazon for a month. Company goes under, Bezos goes away,” AI Carlin said.
That’s neither very funny nor accurate. Besides the impossibility of organizing enough people to give up their addiction to Prime-delivered tchotchkes, the guy who’s been a billionaire for a quarter century and has traded spots back and forth with Elon Musk and French fashion magnate Bernard Arnault as the richest person on the entire planet isn’t going to “go away” even if we all quit Amazon.
Carlin’s daughter Kelly Carlin pulled no punches in her sharp condemnation of the podcasters’ digital resurrection of her father. In a series of posts on The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, she blasted them for “trying to recreate a mind that will never exist again.”
“My dad spent a lifetime perfecting his craft from his very human life, brain and imagination,” wrote Kelly Carlin. “No machine will ever replace his genius.”
She urged her followers to listen to “some actual living human comedians” instead of the AI special, “[b]ut if you want to listen to the genuine George Carlin, he has 14 specials that you can find anywhere.”
In response to a question if the Carlin family had granted permission for this AI special, she was adamant, writing, “ZERO PERMISSION GRANTED.”
She followed up with additional tweets on Thursday, thanking her father’s fans for supporting “our resistance to this AI bullshit” and encourage them to leave comments on the YouTube video of the special and “let the podcasters who collaborate w/ this AI bot know how you feel.”
Kelly Carlin is correct that her father’s work is readily available in multiple places online. Below, his riff on the “Filthy Words” from his 1983 HBO special, Carlin at Carnegie — a far better use of your time than the pale AI imitation.
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