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.
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.
Then who is enslaved?
who used the term?
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 bullshit reasoning that only serves to enrich the capitalist class at the expense of people doing labor.
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.
Right, @gAlienLifeform is playing word games, not the guy who’s arguing that impersonating a dead guy is equivalent to “slavery.”