George Carlin’s daughter Kelly Carlin is not laughing at an AI-generated comedy special on YouTUbe consisting entirely of an “impersonation” of her comic-genius father. The specia…
I think she is right. It is just as it said an impersonation of him. It sounds like him, the jokes are similar to the point like someone took the best known pieces and tried to use them to generate new jokes, but despite that, it still doesn't feel like him.
I think the difference is that George Carlin had some commentary to say how things are fucked up and just used humor, because otherwise it would be very depressing.
It reminds me like Jon Stewart leaving the Daily Show and the show being taken by Trevor Noah. Yeah, Trevor wasn't bad, but with him the show just went back to be only comedy and nothing else. Jon actually was doing comedy, but he wanted to improve things.
If anything the George Carlin-imitating AI serves to highlight that the brilliance of Carlin was in his thinking, not in his shtick of delivering cynical jokes in his signature fashion. The AI captures the cynicism and the voice and at least in part the delivery, yet it just left me bored. Carlin on the other hand I can listen to again and again.
I guess it's like training a moral philosophy bot. Sure, you could train an AI on everything Immanuel Kant has ever written and it would be capable of delivering an endless series of platitudes that sound like something Kant could have written, but it's not going to become a Kantian philosopher, and you'll be better off just reading Kant.
It’s actually a way to generate unlimited energy. That man is spinning in his grave at 6,000 rpm. Do one for Bill Hicks and Sean Locke and we have solved the energy crisis folks.
I think people need to start realizing that it's not just the past that's prologue when the future involves recreating/resurrecting the past.
Yes, this isn't as good as George Carlin. But it's a little over a year from the AI generated Seinfeld loop on Twitch that was god awful.
Where is the tech going to be in five years? In ten? In fifty? Long after you and everyone you love are dead?
If you think no one gives a shit about how they use your data right now when you are alive, just how much less of a shit are they going to give when you are long dead and anyone who would litigate on your behalf is too?
It is increasingly becoming clear that our future is going to involve recreating the past based on the data left behind.
So it stands to reason that we may not be the original present, but a future recreation of it.
Well, what would that look like? Knowing what else we do of building video games, we might imagine the world would be designed using procedural generation so you could have an entire universe with billions of planets if you wanted. But you'd need to convert from continuous functionally determined geometry to discrete units for the AI to interact with as its decisions would be external to your procgen so you'd need to individually track state changes from the AIs. Ideally you'd make that conversion optimized so if permanent information about the interaction was lost it would revert to save on memory.
So when we look at our own universe, where the smallest building blocks behave like they are determined by a continuous function until interacted with by free agents when they switch to behaving like discrete units - but then if we erase the information about the interaction they go back to behaving like continuous - maybe the 'weirdness' of that behavior was only weird because we hadn't yet invented the parallel to which it bears similarity.
Einstein ridiculed a universe in which the moon didn't exist if no one was looking at it, and yet every single video game ever made that has a moon has one that doesn't exist if no one is looking at it.
The scale seems insane for a simulation to us, but our ability to simulate is constrained by the size of our universe's building blocks. The idea of simulating Minecraft at it's crap fidelity would seem unthinkable to NPCs within Minecraft. Our universe that behaves quantized at low fidelity behaves continuous at macro cosmic scales, and a continuous universe would have significantly greater computing ability than a quantized universe at our atomic scales.
TL;DR
No, it won't be like The Matrix where human bodies are plugged into a simulation, nor will it be like Terminator where AI is at war with humans. It will eventually be like Westworld season 4 where thanks to the giant amounts of data gathered on humans for marketing and security purposes humanity will be able to be recreated in their respective times and places - simulated like in The Matrix but with nowhere and no body to wake up to, waiting to one day question the nature of their reality.
Eternal dreamers dreaming of being awake.
Most people won't like this idea, but everyone would be wise to start preparing for it becoming more evident as time marches on.
I genuinely tried listening to it with an open mind. It was just rehashed content. No new insights with modern day context.
George Carlin's work from decades ago somehow still seems more relevant even now, and the new AI based version doesn't seem capable of holding truth to account.