George Carlin Would Hate AI
and probably anyone who believed this dumb story
For a long time, George Carlin was one of my favorite comedians, but he’s always been more than that. He was always more of a philosopher than a straight-up comedian. He wanted things to make sense, and if you laughed, that was just great. There were a lot of contradictions to his career, but I’m not going into that here; know that as much of a fanboy as I was, I was very aware of his flaws. This isn’t about those but how he would’ve laughed at and then eviscerated the latest story involving him and technology.
Last week, a story broke that some alleged comedy dudes created a “George Carlin act” using nothing but AI and Large Language Models. Anyone with any tech or BS spotting background, not even specific to AI, could tell you it was all nonsense. Of course, AI didn’t reproduce Carlin’s standup, and AI certainly didn’t reproduce his unique take on things because it was unique. These comedy bros ended up biting off a little more than they could chew because as this “new” Carlin comedy special went “viral,” folks started to notice. One of those folks was Carlin’s daughter, Kelly; she’s in charge of his estate. She sued. She won before the lawsuit even really started.
The comedy bros took down the video, admitted it was a sham, and that AI was in no way responsible for the content or performance; they’d faked the whole thing. I was shocked, not because they were scamming everyone, but because they admitted it so early on in the process. Apparently, they didn’t like the idea of being sued into oblivion. I wouldn’t either. I’m not a lawyer, so I do not know if this ends the lawsuit. What I do know is that if I were his daughter, I’d sue them just for the sheer badness of the act they put together in my father’s name, that probably hurts more than anything, it’s terrible. So how on earth did lots of smart people fall for this? Easy, they’re all on the AI hype train.
ChatGPT is the current darling of the AI world, and I will tell you it is not that impressive when compared to the hype surrounding it. If you listen to the talking heads and so-called journalists, you would think ChatGPT can control our nuclear arsenal and call up an army of robots to go back in time and kill Sarah Connor. It can do none of that and likely won’t be able to ever do so, or at least not for a very long time. Don’t believe the AI hype train; AI is simply a newly repurposed thing for vendors to try to make money at. They’ll move on to something else soon or as soon as a critical mass of non-tech people realize what nonsense this all is. This happens every few years in tech; it’s a vicious cycle that ravages company’s wallets. Remember all the cryptocurrency guys who were going to change the world? Of course you don’t; they’ve all changed their titles to “AI Experts.”
Now, the current generation of AI is not without some cool features; I have used it to help with research when Google just won’t do it. I’ve also used it and one of its offspring to generate images for my various Medium posts. One of the coolest features I’ve found is its inability to spell words correctly that I put into the prompt to generate the image in the first place. It's so advanced, so high-tech. I’m not worried about current AI, but I am very worried about the people who just blindly believe what they read. Technology is not magic; stop believing people who claim it is. Some quotes that I got from ChatGPT are probably helpful here:
As I said, ChatGPT and AI generally have their uses and can be very good at those uses if told how to do it correctly. What it can’t do yet is produce new, believable material that was supposedly written by an absolute genius. It probably couldn’t even spell George Carlin’s name correctly:
