Kelly Carlin Thoughtfully Flames Will Sasso and His Crappy A.I. George Carlin Special
Earlier this week, the A.I.-assisted podcast Dudesy, co-created by MADtv legend Will Sasso, put out a full hour of post-mortem standup comedy from an A.I. approximation of George Carlin without the permission of his estate, a special they titled, “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead.” Yesterday, Carlin’s daughter Kelly basically replied, “I’m Sorry Your Channel Isn’t.”
Dudesy's “standup special” begins with a disclaimer — the A.I. voice speaks directly to the viewer, warning, “I just want to let you know very clearly that what you're about to hear is not George Carlin. It's my impersonation of George Carlin that I developed in the exact same way a human impressionist would.” The Dudesy creators and their robotic content-churner attempt to frame the little experiment in licensing loopholes as an evolution of the art form of comedy, an achievement in the vein of the real Carlin’s revolutionary elevation of the medium. At the same time, artificial Carlin bragged about his own superiority to the flesh-and-blood artists who came before him, boasting that bots like him will inevitably replace all the humans in the field of funny business. Dudesy’s A.I. imitation plays as gleefully apocalyptic, reveling in its ability to upend and destroy the comedy world as well the careers of the real people within it, presumably including that of its creator, the lauded impressionist Sasso.
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Kelly Carlin, who has a history of bristling at bad attempts by A.I. evangelists to rip off her father’s life’s work, chose her words wisely when responding to the unlicensed A.I. knockoff, unlike the CarlinBot itself. In a series of tweets posted yesterday, the surviving Carlin fiercely criticized the human beings behind Dudesy for bastardizing her dad’s comedy without permission and plastering his name on a derivative product for profit.
In early 2022, Sasso and his partner Chad Kultgen launched Dudesy with the intention of getting ahead of A.I.'s seemingly inevitable integration into the comedy world by using their model as the third mic on their over-the-hump white guy comic podcast, thus combining the two absolute worst trends in comedy into one abortion of a passion project. Sasso and Kultgen regularly program their A.I. to imitate real people for the purpose of conducting fake interviews, with figures like Matthew McConaughey and Alex Jones making recent “appearances” on the show.
After her opening statements on Sasso and Kultgen's use of her father's name, voice and cadence without the permission of his family, Kelly Carlin further lambasted the pair in a series of follow-up tweets, writing, “If you’d like to support our resistance to this AI bullshit, you can leave a comment on the YouTube video of the special. And also let the podcasters that collaborate w/ this AI bot know how you feel.” Carlin warned that Sasso and Kultgen's attempt to steal her father's brand without the blessing or permission of his surviving family is only the beginning of the creatively bankrupt comedy plagiarists' campaign to co-opt the work of the dead, writing, “Hey @zeldawilliams @MelRivers @GarryShandling we should talk. They’re coming for you next.”
Carlin even glibly wrote, “Next thing you know they’ll be resurrecting Jesus next.”