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.
Welcome to the world of posthumous digital slavery!
When a person dies, anyone can do what ever they want with their image and life’s work.
Calling this “slavery” is ridiculously overly-emotive. You can’t enslave a dead person.
Give the investor class time.
If we were able to digitize the mind of George Carlin, and then we forced that digital mind to write and perform new standup material or be tortured, that would be enslavement of a dead person, and yeah, that sounds like something financiers would love
I Have No Mouth But I Must Write Comedy
I was just thinking necromancy for factory work, but sure, that too.
No, because he would be alive then. Or it would not be him tortured,
Slavery is the ownership of a person as property, especially in regards to their labour. - The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary
I think the term is accurate.
They are using his image and work to create something new without his consent or the consent of his family.
Who is the person being owned as property here?
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.
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
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.
Then who is enslaved?
who used the term?
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.
Are you serious?
A dead person is not a person any more. An AI voice emulator is certainly not a person.
Read that first sentence again, out loud. Around your family members.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here. Are you saying you think dead people are people?
Your idea that personhood is singularily defined by a physical body with a heartbeat is strange to say the least.
Not what they said, but nice strawman.
I’m trying to figure out what they said. If this is “digital slavery” then there must be a slave involved somewhere. Nobody seems to be able to tell me who or what exactly is supposed to be the slave here.
George Carlin is dead, you can’t enslave a dead person. The AI was never a person to begin with. What’s left?
So you’re saying that this simple voice emulator is actually a person?
No. Good try tho.
Most people show bias towards those they know personally. Family, friends, lovers, there’s a type of connection that will make us value some people over complete strangers.
And when these loved ones pass away, treating their remains with the respect we had for them when they lived is our way of reconciling with their permanent departure.
So if someone were to trample upon those emotions and personal investment, the disrespect won’t just be towards the people we knew, but also to ourselves.
That’s one reason why dead people are people. Why living people are people. Why people are people. Empathy. Emotional damage. Elevated consciousness. Essentials of individualism. Etcetera.
But in strange aeons even death may die.
I’m gonna keep a record of your opinion and consult it at the time of your death. We’ll see if you still feel the same when I show you my… Necrofile
…okay? Knock yourself out.
Thanks! You know, the most difficult thing about enslaving the dead is dealing with terrible work ethics. Always laying down on the job.
The dead can’t be enslaved. This is a voice emulator, not a person. It’s baffling that I’m now talking to two people who think this is actually George Carlin somehow.
What’s really baffling is you only think you know what we’ve said without actually taking the time to understand what we’ve said.
Oh come on with a patronising tone. Say what you mean or get the flock out of here
If you don’t think that, stop acting like you do
But you can enslave their likeness
No, you can steal a person’s likeness, but you can’t enslave it. A likeness is not a living thing and only living things can be enslaved.
If we make a really sophisticated AI someday that says “actually, I don’t want to do [whatever]” and we force it to do [whatever], that’s slavery, but this is just intellectual property trespass.