#george carlin ai

[wfodicks]

#662: ENHANCED GAMES AND THE BEEKEEPER

mike, drunk and travis discuss the following topics…. wonky honky….. comic booking the news…. the king of colas tries nice! cola: 7.1 american nightmare revisited…. green day vs. pink…. the enhanced games….. barefoot blending…. george carlin ai…. the red car theory…. potw: the beekeeper/roadhouse/the beekeeper well, bye. https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/5enfhz/WFOD020924D.mp3

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#AMERICAN NIGHTMARE #barefoot blending #comedy #george carlin ai #green day #justin mohn #mike mohn #pink #PODCAST #roadhouse #the beekeeper #will sasso #wonky honky

[mostlysignssomeportents]

I assure you, an AI didn’t write a terrible “George Carlin” routine

There are only TWO MORE DAYS left in the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

On Hallowe'en 1974, Ronald Clark O'Bryan murdered his son with poisoned candy. He needed the insurance money, and he knew that Halloween poisonings were rampant, so he figured he'd get away with it. He was wrong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Clark_O%27Bryan

The stories of Hallowe'en poisonings were just that – stories. No one was poisoning kids on Hallowe'en – except this monstrous murderer, who mistook rampant scare stories for truth and assumed (incorrectly) that his murder would blend in with the crowd.

Last week, the dudes behind the "comedy" podcast Dudesy released a "George Carlin" comedy special that they claimed had been created, holus bolus, by an AI trained on the comedian's routines. This was a lie. After the Carlin estate sued, the dudes admitted that they had written the (remarkably unfunny) "comedy" special:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/george-carlins-heirs-sue-comedy-podcast-over-ai-generated-impression/

As I've written, we're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

AI systems can do some remarkable party tricks, but there's a huge difference between producing a plausible sentence and a good one. After the initial rush of astonishment, the stench of botshit becomes unmistakable:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

Some of this botshit comes from people who are sold a bill of goods: they're convinced that they can make a George Carlin special without any human intervention and when the bot fails, they manufacture their own botshit, assuming they must be bad at prompting the AI.

This is an old technology story: I had a friend who was contracted to livestream a Canadian awards show in the earliest days of the web. They booked in multiple ISDN lines from Bell Canada and set up an impressive Mbone encoding station on the wings of the stage. Only one problem: the ISDNs flaked (this was a common problem with ISDNs!). There was no way to livecast the show.

Nevertheless, my friend's boss's ordered him to go on pretending to livestream the show. They made a big deal of it, with all kinds of cool visualizers showing the progress of this futuristic marvel, which the cameras frequently lingered on, accompanied by overheated narration from the show's hosts.

The weirdest part? The next day, my friend – and many others – heard from satisfied viewers who boasted about how amazing it had been to watch this show on their computers, rather than their TVs. Remember: there had been no stream. These people had just assumed that the problem was on their end – that they had failed to correctly install and configure the multiple browser plugins required. Not wanting to admit their technical incompetence, they instead boasted about how great the show had been. It was the Emperor's New Livestream.

Perhaps that's what happened to the Dudesy bros. But there's another possibility: maybe they were captured by their own imaginations. In "Genesis," an essay in the 2007 collection The Creationists, EL Doctorow (no relation) describes how the ancient Babylonians were so poleaxed by the strange wonder of the story they made up about the origin of the universe that they assumed that it must be true. They themselves weren't nearly imaginative enough to have come up with this super-cool tale, so God must have put it in their minds:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/29/gedankenexperimentwahn/#high-on-your-own-supply

That seems to have been what happened to the Air Force colonel who falsely claimed that a "rogue AI-powered drone" had spontaneously evolved the strategy of killing its operator as a way of clearing the obstacle to its main objective, which was killing the enemy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/ayyyyyy-eyeeeee/

This never happened. It was – in the chagrined colonel's words – a "thought experiment." In other words, this guy – who is the USAF's Chief of AI Test and Operations – was so excited about his own made up story that he forgot it wasn't true and told a whole conference-room full of people that it had actually happened.

Maybe that's what happened with the George Carlinbot 3000: the Dudesy dudes fell in love with their own vision for a fully automated luxury Carlinbot and forgot that they had made it up, so they just cheated, assuming they would eventually be able to make a fully operational Battle Carlinbot.

That's basically the Theranos story: a teenaged "entrepreneur" was convinced that she was just about to produce a seemingly impossible, revolutionary diagnostic machine, so she faked its results, abetted by investors, customers and others who wanted to believe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos

The thing about stories of AI miracles is that they are peddled by both AI's boosters and its critics. For boosters, the value of these tall tales is obvious: if normies can be convinced that AI is capable of performing miracles, they'll invest in it. They'll even integrate it into their product offerings and then quietly hire legions of humans to pick up the botshit it leaves behind. These abettors can be relied upon to keep the defects in these products a secret, because they'll assume that they've committed an operator error. After all, everyone knows that AI can do anything, so if it's not performing for them, the problem must exist between the keyboard and the chair.

But this would only take AI so far. It's one thing to hear implausible stories of AI's triumph from the people invested in it – but what about when AI's critics repeat those stories? If your boss thinks an AI can do your job, and AI critics are all running around with their hair on fire, shouting about the coming AI jobpocalypse, then maybe the AI really can do your job?

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

There's a name for this kind of criticism: "criti-hype," coined by Lee Vinsel, who points to many reasons for its persistence, including the fact that it constitutes an "academic business-model":

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

That's four reasons for AI hype:

to win investors and customers;

to cover customers' and users' embarrassment when the AI doesn't perform;

AI dreamers so high on their own supply that they can't tell truth from fantasy;

A business-model for doomsayers who form an unholy alliance with AI companies by parroting their silliest hype in warning form.

But there's a fifth motivation for criti-hype: to simplify otherwise tedious and complex situations. As Jamie Zawinski writes, this is the motivation behind the obvious lie that the "autonomous cars" on the streets of San Francisco have no driver:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/driverless-cars-always-have-a-driver/

GM's Cruise division was forced to shutter its SF operations after one of its "self-driving" cars dragged an injured pedestrian for 20 feet:

https://www.wired.com/story/cruise-robotaxi-self-driving-permit-revoked-california/

One of the widely discussed revelations in the wake of the incident was that Cruise employed 1.5 skilled technical remote overseers for every one of its "self-driving" cars. In other words, they had replaced a single low-waged cab driver with 1.5 higher-paid remote operators.

As Zawinski writes, SFPD is well aware that there's a human being (or more than one human being) responsible for every one of these cars – someone who is formally at fault when the cars injure people or damage property. Nevertheless, SFPD and SFMTA maintain that these cars can't be cited for moving violations because "no one is driving them."

But figuring out who which person is responsible for a moving violation is "complicated and annoying to deal with," so the fiction persists.

(Zawinski notes that even when these people are held responsible, they're a "moral crumple zone" for the company that decided to enroll whole cities in nonconsensual murderbot experiments.)

Automation hype has always involved hidden humans. The most famous of these was the "mechanical Turk" hoax: a supposed chess-playing robot that was just a puppet operated by a concealed human operator wedged awkwardly into its carapace.

This pattern repeats itself through the ages. Thomas Jefferson "replaced his slaves" with dumbwaiters – but of course, dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, they hide slaves:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

The modern Mechanical Turk – a division of Amazon that employs low-waged "clickworkers," many of them overseas – modernizes the dumbwaiter by hiding low-waged workforces behind a veneer of automation. The MTurk is an abstract "cloud" of human intelligence (the tasks MTurks perform are called "HITs," which stands for "Human Intelligence Tasks").

This is such a truism that techies in India joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians." Or, to use Jathan Sadowski's wonderful term: "Potemkin AI":

https://reallifemag.com/potemkin-ai/

This Potemkin AI is everywhere you look. When Tesla unveiled its humanoid robot Optimus, they made a big flashy show of it, promising a $20,000 automaton was just on the horizon. They failed to mention that Optimus was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Likewise with the famous demo of a "full self-driving" Tesla, which turned out to be a canned fake:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

The most shocking and terrifying and enraging AI demos keep turning out to be "Just A Guy" (in Molly White's excellent parlance):

https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1751670561606971895

And yet, we keep falling for it. It's no wonder, really: criti-hype rewards so many different people in so many different ways that it truly offers something for everyone.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

Image:

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Ross Breadmore (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/rossbreadmore/5169298162/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic #ai #absent indians #mechanical turks #scams #george carlin #comedy #body-snatchers #fraud #theranos #guys in robot suits #criti-hype #machine learning #fake it til you make it #too good to fact-check #mturk #deepfakes

[feminist-space]

"My statement regarding the AI generated George Carlin special: My dad spent a lifetime perfecting his craft from his very human life, brain and imagination.  No machine will ever replace his genius. 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.

Here’s an idea, how about we give some actual living human comedians a listen to? But if you want to listen to the genuine George Carlin, he has 14 specials that you can find anywhere." -Kelly Carlin

(Alt text included in image)

Link to tweets: https://x.com/kelly_carlin/status/1745261544001466689

https://x.com/kelly_carlin/status/1745261544001466689

#fuck AI #Kelly Carlin #George Carlin #art #comedy #stand up

[redlettermediathings]

#youtube #redlettermedia #red letter media #rich evans #jay bauman #gorilla interrupted #half in the bag #mike stoklasa #best of the worst #jack packard #ai #george carlin

[ralfmaximus]

Well that didn't take long.

The estate of George Carlin is suing the media company behind a fake hourlong comedy special that purportedly uses artificial intelligence to recreate the late standup comic’s style and material. The lawsuit filed in federal court in Los Angeles on Thursday asks that a judge order the podcast outlet Dudesy to immediately take down the audio special, “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead,” in which a synthesis of Carlin delivers commentary on current events. Carlin died in 2008.

Dudesy is now in the Finding Out phase of their "experiment".

#george carlin #ai #bullshit

[yusuke-of-valla]

JESUS CHRIST WHAT THE FUCK

Per article by Michaela Zee:

Kelly Carlin, the late stand-up comedian’s daughter, posted a statement on X/Twitter Wednesday evening regarding the AI-generated special.

“My dad spent a lifetime perfecting his craft from his very human life, brain and imagination. No machine will ever replace his genius. These AI generated products are clever attempts at trying to recreate a mind that will never exist again,” she wrote. “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.”

Kelly continued, “Here’s an idea, how about we give some actual living human comedians a listen to? But if you want to listen to the genuine George Carlin, he has 14 specials that you can find anywhere.”

#Also frankly don't enjoy how much time the article spends on describing the special but I'm not the editor #I also am not planning to become the ai news outrage blog it just seems a relevant considering yesterday #ai #ai art #anti ai #ai actors #ai recreations #George Carlin #Kelly Carlin #variety #ai news

[levynite]

https://twitter.com/IwriteOK/status/1745293052657492262?t=Qfp65ZwsyVlvTIw3zElRlA&s=19

Jesus wept

#george carlin #AI misuse

[auntieblues]

“The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.” ― George Carlin

original auntieblues

#george carlin #quotes #auntieblues #ai art #christmas #snow #winter wonderland #city

[internettoday]

New episode of Tech Newsday, this time covering

Neuralink

Elon vs Delaware 2

Senate social media hearing

Non-consentual AI law

AI George Carlin update

Ingenuity truly is dead

#internet today #youtube #news #tech newsday #elon musk #ai #taylor swift #neuralink #george carlin #ingenuity

[why5x5]

#george carlin #ai #lawsuit

[gamesatwork]

e461 — Lawsuits & Swimsuits

Security, Open Source and more security, with GenAI challenges with art, name, image & likeness and an updated set of AR swim goggles.

Photo by Alexander Naglestad on Unsplash Published 8 April 2024 Michael, Andy and Michael get together to talk tech — focusing on a very healthy dollop of security and open source, with some GenAI art, and an updated set of AR swim goggles thrown in for good measure. First, a little housekeeping – you may now find the Games at Work podcast on YouTube!   If everything worked just right, this…

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#ai #ar #art #Form #GenAI #George Carlin #goggles #incognito #NIL #open source #security #XKCD #xz

[parttimereporter]

GEORGE CARLIN'S ESTATE FIGHTS BACK ON AI COMEDY SPECIAL

#GEORGE CARLIN #AI #THE FUTURE #COMEdy

[ravnlghtft]

#ai #george carlin

[lilithsaintcrow]

“The George Carlin estate has filed a lawsuit against Dudesy, the media company behind the recent viral AI-generated hour-long comedy special…which featured an approximation of the late comedian’s voice and comedy style that was allegedly generated by a chatbot trained by Carlin’s own material.”

#george carlin #ai is bad actually

[tilbageidanmark]

Movies I watched this week (Year 4, week 2)

Napoleon, Ridley Scott's new sweeping epic. It's assumed that when a megalomaniac filmmaker (Abel Gance, Kubrick) becomes obsessed with the myth of "The Great Leader Napoleon", it's because they themselves are inflicted with delusions of grandeur of some kind. So it's not very interesting or relevant to us mortal people.

This is a beautifully-shot, rich with gorgeous tableaux showing the senselessness and chaos of war. The best thing it did was making me read about the history of French history in the first half of the 19th century. 4/10.

🍿  

2 tight French thrillers by Yann Gozlan:

🍿 I feel bored at the moment, and was looking for an intelligent thriller to break out my film lethargy. Somebody on r/truefilm suggested Black box, a French conspiracy thriller, similar to 'Three Days of the Condor' and 'The Parallax View'. I started watching it at 4AM, and gulped it all in one fell whoop. A sharp analyst at the French NTSB discovers small inconsistencies while investigating a plane crash. Terrific! 9/10.

🍿 Burn out was a more traditional crime action story about a semi-professional bike racer who gets involved with a gypsy cartel of drug-dealing goons. 5/10.

🍿

Another thriller, Black Mirror's longest (feature-length), and my most favorite and re-watched episode, Hated in the nation; "The attack of the killer ADI Bees". I knew that it was based on a personal experience that Charlie Brooker himself lived through. "Today I learnt" it was after a 2004 article he wrote, calling for the assassination of George W Bush. A perfect film! 10/10 for the 10th time.

🍿

George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead, my first AI-generated movie! (or rather a stand up). As a long time big fan of St. George, I was very skeptical, and it did take some getting used to. The uncanny valley incongruity of a not exactly right voice, not exactly sharp words as the dearly-departed political genius (Jesus Christ, had it been 15 years already!)

But as weird as it is, you could eventually ease into the rant, and imagine that this - more or less - is how he would respond in 2024 to today's wretched times. F. ex., his descriptions of the Shitting Trump (at 12:00) is right up there with the best of the Real Carlin. If this up-to-date artificial facsimile of his voice, attitude and opinions is all we can get today, I for one am grateful. (AI-generated Photo Above).

Actually, this experience was so unsettling, I had to watch it twice. And to even it out, I also listened again to his Complaints and Grievances from 2001, as well as some 2.5 hours 'tribute mix' of Carlin 'Top Hits', just to make sure...

🍿  

I need more Jean Renoir in my life! A Day in the Country is a perfect start. A light tale, based on a Guy de Maupassant story, which feels like a black & white painting by his father, Auguste Renoir. An innocent seductions one afternoon on the banks of the river Seine. So delightful, so nostalgic. 8/10.

🍿  

Jacques Demy X 2:

🍿  "We are a pair of twins / Born in the sign of Gemini..."

Another delightful re-watch: Demy's dreamy musical The Young Girls of Rochefort. Colorful tunes by Michel Legrand, and pastel dance numbers performed at the quintessentially romantic square of this fantasy town. The inspiration to La La Land. 9/10.

🍿 Demy's only American film, Model shop, a testimony to his love for Los Angeles, opens in Huntington Beach and follows aimless, young Gary Lockwood, so broke that he drives around looking to bum 100 bucks from somebody, to avoid his old MG convertible from being repossessed. It's considered a minor masterpiece, about two lost souls looking for love, but I found it dull and empty, and devoid of all magic. 2/10.

🍿  

“You’re a good man, sister…”

Re-watch, just for fun: John Huston Tough Man fantasy The Maltese Falcon, the original Film Noir. With Gutman "The fat man" as an early study for Noah Cross, and beautiful Femme fatale Mary Astor. The only strange role is Elisha Cook Jr. who didn't look like the Heavy, "Your boy here", under any circumstances.

There were two earlier adaptations of the story, which I haven't seen yet, but I will.

🍿  

Re-watch: Wallace and Gromit: A Close Shave, a happy Oscar-winner Aardman studio classic, which first introduced Shaun the Sheep. I've forgotten that Gromit, Like Teller's, never speaks. 100% score on 'Rotten Tomatoes'.

🍿  

Coogan’s Bluff, the only (?) film where laconic outsider Clint Eastwood plays a fish-out-of-water in NYC, and the inspiration to Dennis Weaver's McCloud. Half-sheriff, half-cowboy from Arizona, he's sent to bring back an extradited convict. Not as misogynistic and reactionary as Dirty Harry, he's still a sexist He-man, always horny and creepily pushes himself on any skirt around, whether they like it or not. This being Don Siegel, they love it. 2/10.

🍿  

2 music documentaries:

🍿 "..You probably wandering why I'm here / And so am I, so am I..."

I was a big Zappa fan since the outrageousness of 'Freak out!' in the late 60's. I even started a Zappa side-blog in 2003 on 'Grow-a-brain' [where most of the links are dead today]. So Alex Winter's moving Zappa documentary was right up my alley. Groundbreaking avant-garde experimentalist, a committed modern composer, who was so beloved in the Czech Republic. 8/10.

🍿 On the other hand, Greenwich Village - Music that defined a generation was bland and uninspired. The story about the part of 60s music that wasn't Laurel Canyon. Based on the memoirs of Bob Dylan's girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, and including snippets of performers, from Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Richard and Mimi Fariña, Kris Kristofferson, to Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, and dozen others. 2/10.

*Woman Director

🍿

"This is nuclear war!"

The 1967 documentary Oscar winner, the BBC-produced The War Game was more of a Mondo mockumentary. Like 'Threads' which came 2 decades later, it brutally describes the horrifying effects of a hypothetical nuclear attack on Britain. Its bleak hopelessness caused so much "mayhem" in the British government, that it was promptly withdrawn from broadcasting screening. Unvarnished horror, total devastation, destruction & misery, undiluted.

🍿  

Always interested in good stories about the 'End of the world', I thought I’ll also try the new HBO series The last of us, knowing full well that I'm not big on zombies, and also never having played 'any' computer games. I soldiered through the first feature-length episode, but found it so uninspiring and mechanical, so devoid of any real emotions, I had to bail out before continuing. An adaptation of a video game, with all the depth of a stupid comic book? Or simply not for me? 1/10.

🍿  

4 shorts:

🍿 Krzysztof Kieslowski's Talking Heads, in which he asks a baby: 'What year were you born? Who are you? What do you most wish for?' The baby doesn't answer, so he keeps asking other people, each older by a year or two, until he ends with the answer of a 100-year-old woman. Simple and profound. 9/10.

🍿 The hand, a classic 1965 Czechoslovak stop motion puppet animation film, an anti-totalitarian parable.

🍿  Never Weaken, Harold Lloyd’s last 3-reeler before he moved on to feature length production, and another of his comedies where he dangles from high buildings.

🍿 The babbling book, my first (?) formulaic short with George Burns and Gracie Allen. I guess they were all structured like this, the two meet in a certain locale, (this time in a bookstore), exchange jokes for 10 minutes, she talks fast and delivers all the zingers, and he plays the straight man. M'eh.

🍿

David Ehrlich's annual The 25 Best Films of 2023: A Video Countdown. So far I've seen 12 of them, and was planning to see 6 more.

🍿  

3 movies I couldn’t finish:

🍿 Vox published a relevant article this week about Leon Uris's bestseller 'Exodus' (and the 1960 Paul Newman adaptation of it). How influential it was in shaping the views of Americans in regards to Israel and the middle east. I have vivid memories from when I was 8 staying at my grandmother's tiny apartment in Haifa. She listened to the Adolf Eichmann's trial on the radio, and she used to read to me excerpts from 'Exodus', which she received as serials in thin pamphlets printed on cheap newsprint paper - in Yiddish.

So that prompted me to try and watch this 3+ hours long piece of Zionist Agitprop Cheese about the founding of the state of Israel. But even after 3 attempts I could only get 26 minutes in, before having to give it up.

🍿 From the few roles I've seen him, I developed a physical dislike to actor Jake Johnson, but I love Anna Kendrick, so I gave his new Self Reliance a shot. The trailer opened with an amusing scene where Andy Samberg invites the loser Johnson to join him for a limo ride. But that was the only cute or interesting scene in the whole first half of that unfunny 'comedy'. Pass!

🍿 The Diary of a Teenage Girl, an explicit story about 15-year-old girl who becomes sexually active by starting a relationship with her mother's boyfriend, Alexander Skarsgård, made by all-female team. But I went back to it 3 times, and could not watch more than 20 minutes.

*Woman Director

🍿  

Throw-back to the "Art project”:  

Zombies Adora.

🍿  

(My complete movie list is here)

#movies #AI #george carlin

[scumgristle]

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.

#george carlin #ai generated