Today feels like a good day to ignore dumb AI stunts and watch the real George Carlin
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Earlier this week, “news” broke that quickly caused a lot of people to disregard Paul Anka’s classic advice on monsters (and whether you should give them the precious, life-giving attention that they crave): The announcement that some folks (including, bizarrely, former Mad TV star Will Sasso) had fed a bunch of routines from late stand-up comedy legend George Carlin into an AI and caused it to shit out an hour of “stand-up” presented in a digital facsimile of Carlin’s voice.
From a very narrow, very cynical perspective, this was a brilliant idea—because there are few forces on this planet more motivating than irritation, and few stunts you could pull more irritating than taking the work of a beloved, dead comedic iconoclast and subjected them to this sort of algorithmic hell. Across five decades of comedy, Carlin was an incredibly hard voice to pin down: Profane, cranky, cynical, strangely hopeful, and often, shockingly, silly, playing with language, ideas, political concepts, and more in an effort to both delight people and make them think. Shoving all of that into the woodchipper and reducing him to a series of machine-crafted memes is an act designed to kick the amygdala of anyone with even an ounce of affection for comedy into high gear, and the responses to the “special” have, presumably, been exactly as intended.
Instead of putting emphasis on that deliberate ragebait, though, we’d like to take a second to focus on the statement made in response to the AI Carlin by the actual man’s daughter, Kelly Carlin. She wrote on social media this week that,
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.
To that end, we’ll note that most of Carlin’s classic specials are available as part of multiple streaming packages—most notably Amazon’s Prime Video, which features most of them, including several that include versions of Carlin’s famed “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television.” (We’ll express an especial weakness for 1996's Back In Town, if only because it was our first personal exposure to Carlin’s mixture of caustic wit, political anger, and outright silliness—all those things that made Carlin so great, and so impossible to imitate.) That’s before you even begin hunting for the troves of material that have made their way onto places like YouTube: All vital, hilarious, and above all else real. As for that other things, well:
