Will Sasso is a comedian most people know from his hilarious and viral lemon-eating vines/memes, his years-long stint on Mad TV, and his portrayal of Curly in The Three Stooges (2012).
Chad Kultgen is less famous, but holds his own with a few novels, podcasts, and screenplays that showcase his uniquely smart and forward-thinking comic voice.
Friends for a long time, they started hosting the smart and groundbreaking podcast, Dudesy about two years ago, a show created by an AI that “selected” them to be the hosts. It’s a fun experiment to see how much of the heavy lifting AI can do in a creative endeavor.
On January 9, the co-host of the show (an AI-generated character named Dudesy) uploaded an hour-long George Carlin special called I’m Glad I’m Dead, using AI to recreate Carlin’s voice to tell Carlinesque jokes, with fake laughs to make it sound like a live recording.
Watching the special feels like a watershed moment in the advance of AI. It doesn’t sound much better than the AI-generated voices we’ve heard. It gets the essence of George Carlin, but there’s none of his wide variety of character voices, speed, or intonation.
Better than the voice are the jokes. A lot of the material is off, delivered with a robot’s droning pace, but there are moments in the special that sound like legitimate, funny, and smart Carlin jokes as if he actually came back from the dead to tell them.
The special is flooded with angry comments on YouTube. Carlin’s daughter came out with a strong statement condemning it. The media is all over it, mostly covering the controversy with Carlin’s daughter.
Sasso and Kultgen and their AI co-host are doing us a service, showing us what AI is capable of, and scaring us a little.
Check it out and see what you think.
It doesn't replace the joy and thrill of live comedy shows, but this is going to change the world of online comedy (TikToks, Memes, Tweets, YouTube videos etc) so far ahead that we may lose interest in what the bots have to say and go back to offline (live) shows again.
My guess on a timeline of events:
1. AI gets really good mimicking humans and creating content
2. A law may get passed to differentiate online content with flags, icons, badges or other indicators to make it obvious who the human users are interacting with (Eg: "Made by AI" next to a profile picture).
3. If #2 doesn't happen, people will generally grow skeptical and lose interest of online content, OR we go nuts and start doing crazy things. Forcing #2 to indeed happen, just much later on.
4. If #2 does happen, people will crave human touch, since online content will be so obviously dominated by AI.
5. People go back to real world comedy to feel the connection again.
I laughed a few times for sure, and then turned it off because I was creeped out.