The George Carlin AI Standup Is Worse Than You Can Imagine

An AI assisted podcast released a new comedy special featuring an AI-generated version of the late comedian George Carlin, and it’s worse than you could possibly imagine. 

The cursed hour-long special is the work of Dudesy, a podcast hosted by Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen and curated by an AI program with the same name. At the start of the special, Dudesy intones that it devoured the work of the long dead comedic genius and rendered it into a terrible, hour-long facsimile of Carlin’s work called I’m Glad I’m Dead. It’s all on YouTube for everyone to cringe along to, and fair warning from a fan of the real Carlin such as myself: it can not be unseen. 

The AI comedian, which is not funny and only sounds vaguely like Carlin, spends the hour riffing on various topics like Taylor Swift, U.S. gun culture—and of course, hyping the supposedly revolutionary potential of AI technology.

Carlin’s family did not give Dudesy permission to create the special, and his daughter, Kelly, publicly denounced it on X. “My dad spent a lifetime perfecting his craft from his very human life, brain and imagination. No machine will ever replace his genius,” she wrote on the website formerly known as Twitter. “These AI generated products are clever attempts at trying to recreate a mind that will never exist again. Let’s let the artist’s work speak for itself. Humans are so afraid of the void that we can’t let what has fallen into it stay there.”

Sasso and Kultgen played a clip of the Carlin-bot on their show before dropping the entire special on YouTube. The pair seemed visibly uncomfortable during the segment—Sasso especially. The former Mad TV comedian lambasted AI comedy. 

"I personally dont want to hear a fuckin' Nirvana song that’s not written by Kurt Cobain and played by fuckin' Nirvana, I dont give a shit, I don't give a shit. It's not real, it doesn't matter," Sasso said. "Anyone can do an impression, Dudesy is doing an impression…I don't think a new comic has anything to worry about because we need new voices."

"Dudesy has consumed every Carlin special and has pulled off something miraculous, but its not, by definition, new. It's taken from a bunch of other shit," Sasso said. 

Despite the obvious discomfort, the pair still pushed people to watch the special. The podcast exists to promote Dudesy, and promote Dudesy they did. A screen behind their heads displayed the name of the AI model, and Sasso wore a large belt emblazoned with the AI’s logo. The Dudesy show launched in March 2022, and Sasso and Kultgen have said they can't reveal the company behind the AI due to a non-disclosure agreement. 

The special is a little more than an hour long and begins with a disclaimer where the Dudesy AI explained it was doing an impression. It was intercut with crowd noises and featured AI-created images that reflected the bits. The gist of the special is that Carlin is back from the dead to tell some jokes and try to allay your fears about AI. 

“AI will not replace most jobs, it's going to make them easier,” Dudesy as Carlin said in the special. “Right now, you should be watching a few YouTube videos to figure out how to train ChatGPT to do your job for you so you can dick off all day and still get a raise. And if AI does replace your job, rest assured the billionaires will still find a way to force you into wage slavery for $10 to $15 hours a day so you won’t have time to think about restructuring society into a more equitable model for everyone.”

The AI model then painted a picture of a horrifying world where all your dead favorite comedians are back, forever. “I might be the first standup comic brought back from the dead by AI but I certainly won’t be the last. Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, Bill Hicks, Robin Williams, Dick Gregory, Andy Kaufman, Mom Mabley, Sam Kinnison,” it said. As it name-checks the dead, grotesque AI generated version of their faces flash on the screen. 

“Everybody’s coming back and we’re all gonna have our own 24 hour a day, 7 day a week, 365 day a year stream commenting on everything that’s happening in the world as it happens,” it said. “AI-resurrected standup comedians are gonna be the news anchors of the next decade. Which, now that I think of it, means news anchors are probably out of a job too.”

Dudesy doing Carlin spins this as something to be embraced. Imagine Cosby jokes without all the Cosby sexual assault, it explained. What if we had Catholic priests without the crimes? AI, it said, will usher in a heavenly future with no theft. Save for, of course, the theft we’re witnessing before our very eyes as a machine scoops up a lifetime's work of an artist and uses it to spin a fairytale about a future where art is replaced by machines controlled by the wealthiest among us.

I’ll be honest. Fear is at the core of my disgust. The early battle against AI feels like it’s already over. The financial incentives are too great and the billionaires pushing AI will do anything to make a few extra bucks. The idea of stripping creative jobs from humans and ceding it to cheaper machines is just too lucrative an idea to pass on.

Case in point: Valve will now allow AI-powered games onto its Steam digital distribution platform. The hit video game The Finals uses AI-generated voices. SAG-AFTRA is penning a deal with an AI voice generation studio. Journalist Jeff Jarvis testified before the U.S. Senate about the need to protect the rights of AI journalists. Human creativity is already being swallowed up. It’s already here.

But all this work is built on human training data. Midjourney can’t generate anything until it’s pored over millions of human created artworks. ChatGPT and other LLMs rely on vast swaths of copyrighted material created by human hands. Dudesy can’t fart out a crass imitation of George Carlin without viewing 14 standup specials that are the sum of a human’s life, dreams, and labor.

AI will win in this battle, but I don’t believe it will win the war. It's an open question whether people will accept AI-generated content, and the public reception to the faux-Carlin special hasn't exactly been overwhelmingly positive. Even Sasso, a comedian linked to this project and ostensibly tasked with promoting it, doesn't really buy it. 

And when AI runs out of human material, it will have to devour its own output to keep the churn of content coming, and the results will be disastrous. But we’re in for a rough and very stupid few years as the moneyed classes buoy this experiment. More memories will be desecrated. More jobs will be lost. More people like Sasson and Kultgen will wince into the camera, acting as handmaidens to the short-term destruction of their own craft.