What do you guys think of these AI-generated stand up comedy specials?
So I came across this new dudesy video titled "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead" and it put me down a weird rabbit hole. I'm not a Carlin super fan but I know some of his famous bits and respect his work and maybe that's the perfect setup for watching this because... I'm honestly blown away. I planned on listening to 3 minutes of it to make fun of stupid AI but ended up letting it run for the entire hour and actually laughed quite a bit. It all makes sense. It does sound like him. I don't know how much editing went into it, how much prompting and discarded material. I especially don't know if it just dug up old jokes somewhere else and copied them. But still.
It feels like we just had awkward AI-wordsalad experiments and things like the infinite Seinfeld stream which was fun in a so-bad-it's-good kinda way but... I mean, it obviously was bad. The funny part was that it was unpredictably bad.
But only a year later we're having some uncanny valley shit. I looked it up and apparently this started with a comedy podcast with an AI co-host which produced a clip for a fictional Tom Brady standup routine which turned out popular enough to get them sued, apparently.
There's this part in the fake Carlin special where he talks about the future of entertainment being 24-hour streams where an AI comedian comments on daily news events in real time or something and I can't say I wouldn't watch that. Just to see what it's like. But I also get people calling it disgusting. It kinda is. I get [his daughter says "machine will ever replace his genius"](machine will ever replace his genius), she's right of course. But that video got close IMO.
You can still point at little flaws here and there with AI generated content but with this trend, it will be 3 or 5 years before we get perfectly polished content machines that don't trip over any of the easy and obvious stuff. What place would such content have in the entertainment industry?
What do you guys think?
I listened to the whole thing.
So first off, I did laugh. There was humor in it. Things made me smile, made me nod; it was entertaining. It didn't have what I'd call really good comic timing, which was something Carlin was quite skilled at in how he paced and delivered his routines, but even so it was still an amusing hour. The laugh track bothered me some, but at the same time it's supposed to be a live performance, so the laugh track kinda needs to be there to deliver the experience in that way; call that a quibble and a wash I suppose.
People keep commenting it sounds like Carlin, and I'm not quite sure what they mean. If they mean the actual voice, the audible experience of closing your eyes and hearing the George Carlin talking ... I didn't hear that. It sounded Carlin-esque to me, like someone you'd get if the producer said "we can't afford Carlin, so go find us a Carlin we can get instead."
If they mean the authorial voice ... kinda sorta could have been something Carlin looked in on during the writing of. It didn't really strike me as something Carlin would have written. We're back to "Carlin-esque" again for me. It didn't have the incisive insight and razor edge Carlin did, but the authorial voice is closer than the audio to being Carlin.
I'm really unclear, even after a bit of searching since this morning, exactly how much AI was involved in this. The Reddit thread in /r/techology is a fucking dumpster fire (and I didn't even bother flipping through the one in /r/television yet), but there's comments all over the spectrum. Some think a guy wrote and voiced it and ran it through an AI speech-synthesizer. Some think a guy wrote it and the AI voiced it entirely. Some think a guy took AI writing and "punched it up." Some think some guy pushed play on an AI and it spit out an hour that was put on Youtube.
Even on the podcast segment dealing with the routine, the two hosts (Sasso, Kultgen) seemed unclear and uncertain as to how much AI was involved. So that didn't help very much.
It seems super fashionable to shit on AI right now. In much the same way as "thank you for your service" or "I'm sorry for your loss" or "how dare you" are the automatic, unquestioned, unthinking, absolute expected and required responses to certain situations or comments, shitting all over AI has made it into that category. Where the absolute response (at least online in a lot of places) is that you must, must, must shit on AI. That AI holds no value, has no useful or good purpose, and is Satan incarnate.
As an aside, one Reddit comment compared the reactions to the 80s "Satanic Panic" which I found to be quite apt and very on-point. Because it's largely manifesting in the same way. A ton of people, who know nothing, have looked into exactly zero percent, have huge opinions they're absolutely certain about. And those opinions are that it's bad. The guy who made that comment was being downvoted, of course.
All the hysteria makes it tough to have any kind of discussion or see any evolution of the collective response. What with everyone bandwagoning (and terrified of being called out for not being on the right wagon, dancing to the same tune everyone else is as the groupthink band plays on.)
Humans do bring an element to art. But, at the same time, we haven't had any comparison (since humans are it, and we haven't met any other intelligences). And even now, it's arguable that we do have a comparison even at this point since AGI iterates off its human starting point.
I've found people really, really, really get bent out of shape when you point out that art has formats and formulas. They treat it like a bad thing. Or they weaponize it, use the concept that art has forms against the art. These social bandwagon warriors seem to want to demand all art be 100% original in every conceivable way.
Which is, of course, impossible. Art is derivative because humans are derivative. Worse (and more to the point) humans demand conformity.
If you walk into an elevator and face the back, the direction you entered in, people freak out. Why? Because you didn't turn 180 to face the door, the way they expect. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of things like this. Ways of speaking, orders of words, mannerisms and actions, on and on; humans hate change and fear the new. Resist conformity at your peril, and most of the time, most of us just go along to get along because there are way more of "them" than there are of you.
So it's always rubbed me the wrong way when bandwagoners want to shit on AI with the uninspired line "it's derivative". Humans aren't any more original. Put a bunch of comedians in a room and start lobbing shit at them, and way more often than a layperson expects or assumes, for each idea you toss in, multiple of those comedians are going to reflexively come up with the same lines.
Of course they don't have to stop at that first response, and shouldn't. It's just an example. A lot of people like vlogs, or let's play videos, or general "narrated" video content where someone talks along with the video, and I promise you a ton of the shit you hear that "original organic human" coming up with to say is derivative and iterative. They're filling the aural space the only way they know how to; babbling out things their brains, molded by the demand of humans to conform to the expected, find to be of those molds.
I would assume that whoever controls the Dudesy Ai didn't just have it give them an hour of text. Or a series of passages that added up to an hour. They probably did some human sorting and organizing and so forth. Likely they had it refine some of the thoughts or passages a bit, I'd expect. It's just an assumption though, since I can't find anything concrete about exactly what went on behind the video I listened to.
But it just ... it's just a little tiring how high the flames were over on Reddit about this thing. The routine was entertaining. I did laugh. I shudder to think of what arguments anyone wants to raise against me, and why I should be expected to defend the fact that I listened and laughed. My reactions are my own. No one has the right to tell anyone else how to react to art; one man's masterpiece is another's piece of shit and all that.
Years ago I saw a newspaper cartoon where the wife has dragged her husband to see Titanic and, as she sobs while the credits roll, asks him what he thinks. She flips the fuck out when he says "well, I mean, I guess it was alright." The punchline was something like "I don't love you anymore" or "you're sleeping on the couch tonight" or "I'm taking the car you home you can walk."
That's what comes to mind, with the thought of the flaming bullshit I saw piling up at Reddit fresh. It's a new technology. If the AI truly did 100% of it (expect, presumably, uploading the video to Youtube), then it's 100% a technology. It's more of a tool, to my thinking, depending on how much human intervention was involved. If the human edited and rewrote and tried to tweak timing and stuff like that, definitely more of a tool by my definition.
Either is interesting to me.
Today a bar owner pays a fee to a licensing company to have any music she wants piped in to entertain her patrons. At the cinema, the movie gets made and then shown to billions of people with the press of a button. You can go to a local stage and (sound system willing) have an immersive audio experience supporting a single performer on stage.
Yes, back in the day, people were up in fucking arms over recorded music. "What about all the musicians?" was the cry. And yes, the number of band and orchestra members declined. How many of the people today, screaming at the top of their lungs against AI, give two shits about not having a live band being required to hear music? How many would scream just as insanely if they couldn't tap-tap-tap on their phone and get any of literally millions of songs played at whim? Who would be pissed if they couldn't use their cars, and instead had to pay to stable and care for a horse, learn how to hitch and drive it, and upkeep the wagon?
Technology moves on. It's what brought humans out of the sea or down from the trees. I read these knee-jerk reactions against AI and it just boggles my mind. At how blind and forgetful such takes are. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. Whining about AI writing, or painting, speaking, video animating even ... doesn't change that AI can do that now, and will continue to improve at it.
There will always be a place for humanity in art. The tech isn't going away, and (oligarchs willing) humans aren't either.
I don't think AGI is going to be a corporate gold mine (or even one for individuals, for that matter), but I don't think it's going away. The ability for an average layperson to sit down and lob their insane ideas at an AGI, and get back books, songs, movies, whatever ... it's too compelling. People who want that unique custom content, but aren't rich enough to commission such art to specifically suit their thoughts, will eat consumer-level AGI up with a spoon. While licking their lips and demanding, more, more, more!
I can't draw, and I don't have either photographic skill or models willing to indulge me, but even with the rudimentary functionality of Stable Diffusion I can get "custom" pictures out of my graphics card. AGI video is starting to come online. Another chip generation or so and text out of LLMs will come out of the cloud and down to the consumer level.
None of that is not going to happen. And screaming about it just makes one look foolish. Plus spikes their blood pressure, which is dangerous since most of us can't afford health care.
What's going to be left is what's always left. There were thousands and tens of thousands of painters working in any of the "great" painting periods of art history. Even people with doctorates in art history can probably only name a couple handsful of them. The rest never broke out of the pack. Some of them might have even have been better than Picasso or whoever else one of those Art PhDs could rattle off.
They just never got the break. Same as then, same as now. The fact that AI might somehow ruin things for the artists who aren't lucky (or special) enough to rise out of the masses doesn't change that you can't stuff the genie back into the lamp.
And while the genie's out, some folks are going to find some really clever, interesting, entertaining things to have the genie do for them. Some of that stuff is going to rise out of the pack and delight millions.
Same as it ever was.
You put a lot of time into describing anyone who finds issue with this as rabid and unthinking, but I'm going to wade into that conversation anyway.
I do dislike AI art, but I consider that to be primarily a matter of taste rather than a moral stance. Just as a human artist whose work I tend to dislike can occasionally make something that I find myself enjoying, it's not impossible for AI to make something that I like, but most of the pieces I've seen were very obviously AI generated and I very much dislike them.
That would be the end of my general stance if we lived within an economic system where labor saving devices meant an increased standard of life for everyone with more leisure time for workers, but we do not. My gripe here is not with AIs existence as a technology or its ability to make art, but rather with the inevitability of our capitalist system using it to reduce income going to workers and increase income going to owners while they absolutely do not restrict themselves to using it for projects that it's capable of handling, leading to a decrease in quality as a whole. That is not an anti-technology perspective, it is an anti-capitalist one. Were labor not required for survival and maximization of profit not valued over artistic merit, my general attitude about AI would be completely different.
With this special specifically, my primary issue is not that it's AI generated, it's that it's against the wishes of Carlin's family. Regardless of how it's done, that makes it distasteful and cruel Let them have peace, let the man rest. Being in the public eye does not make a person public property, and putting words in their mouth posthumously is crass and unkind. If a human were absorbing as much of Carlin's work as possible and synthesizing it into a new special, I would find it equally cruel and equally tacky. There's also no reason to believe that Carlin would want this. If he'd been clearly interested and excited about this sort of thing, but his living family was against it, that would at least make for an interesting dilemma, but with no instruction from him and objections from him family, I see absolutely no justification for this other than "too bad so sad", which I think merits the angry responses that you've seen.
I largely agree with you on this perspective, but I think the best response to it is that our efforts should be directed at actually hindering or dismantling this type of capitalist exploitation rather than the technology that they're using for it this decade. Humans using new technological advancements when they're available is far harder to change when compared to the capitalist system -- there was a time before capitalism, after all.
I 100% agree that this was a tacky, insensitive move given that Carlin's family was against it. Regardless on one's position on AI art more generally, I think it's possible (and correct) to call this distasteful as a result.
Oh absolutely, that's part of my point, it's not in conflict with it. I am saying that it's possible to be angry after reading an article about, for example, a streaming platform using AI to reduce labor costs by having it write scripts and laying off screenwriters, without being technophobic in the slightest.
I’ve done this a few times while squeezing into a full elevator and it didn’t seem like anyone paid it mind. Maybe it’s a cultural thing?
I mean … aren’t they justified? Apologies for skimming your post a little, but it seems like the thesis was “generative AI will devour all creative jobs; there’s no way to stop this, so everyone should accept that and stop complaining”.
(please ignore the following if that assumption was incorrect) if that’s the case, then I firmly disagree. People are pissed and are expressing their dislike of this situation. It’s a knee-jerk response in the sense of frogs flipping out when their pot starts boiling. I don’t expect people to have nuanced views or to be able to propose solutions; I should hope that’s what we elect representatives for (who then delegate to professionals). If that involves attempting to stuff the genie back in, then the least we can do is try.
A better solution would probably involve sharing the profits from generative AI to human artists, imo, but I’m not a policy expert.
I haven’t tried it, but I heard llama cpp wasn’t bad around mid-2023? The crux of it is that inference over LLMs isn’t uniquely computationally expensive, it’s simply very memory intensive. Most consumer desktop computers don’t have architectures that allow GPUs to efficiently access the (typically) largest pool of memory on the machine (main memory), so shifting the implementation over to the CPU as llama cpp did puts it in range of many more machines.
No first hand experience with it, though, but it makes some sense from first principles.
You make a fair point, but to me it's implied we should stop working on AI to prevent capitalistic greed from ruining it... instead of working to prevent capitalistic greed in the first place?
I think it says something about how hopeless most of us feel that stopping AI feels 1000 times more realistic than stopping capitalistic greed.
I really like this comment, both the parts I agree with and the parts I have some quibbles with. It's very thorough and effective in expressing your perspective. But towards the end you refer to these models as AGI I think by mistake instead of GenAI -- AGI is an artifical intelligence with versatility on as wide a varoety of tasks as the human brain, something we're not nearly so close to achieving, whereas generative AI like these are designed to perform more limited specific tasks that involve generating some output themselves (such as videos or the answers to questions) in response to a prompt. It might seem nitpicky but AGI is a pretty contentious topic and you've accidentally implied that you hold a pretty radical position by using it to describe these GenAI comments.
I hate it. Carlin is dead. Don't presume to know what he'd say or think, especially not without his estate's approval.
This is going to become more and more common as such things have always been done, and now we have a new medium to do it in, which will cause even more confusion.
I don’t think it was that uncommon to begin with. “Elvis impersonator” is an entire genre. You could say the same there - you shouldn’t presume what Elvis would think or say posthumously.
Question, though - are the people doing Elvis impersonation also creating new music using Elvis's name?
That's what these folks did with George Carlin.
Seems like it. Not an Elvis impersonator expert, but according to Wikipedia,
Minor quibble, but that's an unsourced claim.
My point is, I suspect that Elvis impersonators are largely performing Elvis's songs, or perhaps writing their own music in a style similar to that of Elvis himself. But those songs written by the impersonator are not marketed or sold as being "written by Elvis".
The same cannot as readily be said of this. The video on YouTube is simply titled "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead (2024) - Full Special". That does not suggest parody or pastiche; it suggests that it is written and performed by George Carlin, which it is not.
I understand that they claim it is impersonation in the description of the video. I don't know that that is enough.
In terms of the actual impersonation aspect, I suppose it’s not in the title, but I don’t think it’s really causing many, if any, people to think it’s real Carlin audio. For one, he’s, well, dead, and that is somewhat of an impediment to releasing new work personally. There is a date in the title, and it lampshades his death in it.
Secondly, it seems the entire gimmick around dudesy is being AI, and it is in the description.
There's also a pretty obvious disclaimer at the beginning of the video, for what it's worth
I have no interest in watching the video, so I would never have known.
There's still a litany of work being released posthumously for a variety of artists, even those that have been dead longer than Carlin has. Jimi Hendrix had a posthumous album released in 2018, and he'd been dead for 48 years at that point. Those posthumous albums have release dates that do not correspond with when the originals were recorded.
I dunno, I'm probably too wound up about this. I just loathe AI (even if, in this case, it's a gimmick rather than a real application of it).
Totally unsolicited opinion here... Hating AI sounds masochistic. Like hating weather. It's not going away.
Coincidentally, people often don't like the weather. I'm sure you've complained about it.
I don't have to like it, even if it's not going away. It's kind of like herpes in that respect.
I don't think I've ever complained about the weather. Either it's solar radiation from 90 million miles away, providing the keystone source of anti-entropic energy on earth or it's water just randomly falling from the sky or puffy blobs of gravity defying vapor or little floating crystals or some other miraculous event.
It seems to me that hating inexorable parts of existence is just adding hate to the world for no reason. There are plenty of changeable things to hate.
Refusing to acknowledge that I don't like that I'm cold and wet seems far more stressful and emotionally taxing to me than just going ahead and hating it until I can get warm and dry again. Being unable to change the weather doesn't make being cold and wet any more pleasant, and it's okay to not like being uncomfortable.
I am actually jealous if actively hating something you can't control improves your mental stamina. That's the opposite of my entire life's experience.
I wouldn't say actively hating it helps, it's passively hating it that works for me. Sitting there thinking "I hate this, I wish it would stop, why does it have to be so cold and rainy, does anyone like this, I wish I didn't have to go out today, this is the worst,..." and on and on doesn't help at all. But refusing to let thoughts like that tiptoe into my brain is just as exhausting. The trick is to just accept that I hate it and move on. My mental browser has a tab open for hating it, but I don't actually click on that one or spend much time on it as an active tab, if that makes sense as an analogy.
Ah. I wouldn't call that hate then, personally. I see though.
I think it's more "admitting this sucks" makes surviving the suck easier. Walking through a swamp sucks but it's how we get back to camp sometimes so we live with the suck and embrace it until it's over. Doesn't mean I like it but I admit that it sucks and it gives me the extra energy to change or outlast the conditions.
I don’t have a firm opinion on this and I’m open to change, but my first impression is — why do we care what his estate has to say on the matter? He’s dead. Do we even know that Carlin approves of whoever is managing his estate at this time? And following the assumption that Carlin’s wishes are aligned with the executor or trustee or whatever he has, at what point do we stop caring? We certainly aren’t getting permission from Shakespeare’s descendants.
Because his estate represents (or at least should represent) his interests in what he wants out of his life's work. If his estate is fine with the use of AI in replicating his likeness and comedic stylings, then presumably so would he be. If not, then presumably he would not be.
The manager of his estate is his daughter. I'm guessing George would have approved. At the very least, she is probably in the best general position to represent his interests.
I don't think you get to (legally) make that decision. You can stop caring now, for all it matters to anyone.
Considering there are no descendants of Shakespeare, I don't think permission is needed.
For a less jokey/ironic answer, Shakespeare has been dead for 460 years. Carlin has been dead for 16. That's a pretty substantial difference, particularly considering his daughter is still alive and, presumably, acting on his wishes regarding his life's work. Maybe in another generation or two we can reconvene on the "statute of limitations" for how long someone has to be dead for us to care about their interests - but George is still quite recent.
My unprofessional opinion is, a lot. Assuming it wasn't ghostwritten by the human creators entirely (comedian Will Sasso and some writer I'm not familiar with).
The vocal synthesis is already achievable through stuff like ElevenLabs, which nails the natural rhythms and even emotional content of spoken text. But the coherency and genuine humor of the special is on a whole 'nother level compared to everything else I've seen. Even GPT-4 struggles to write comedy that isn't bland, disjointed, and mediocre, to the point that I think true wit and personality is the last, best test of these models. The idea of a two-man YouTube channel working with an anonymous company making something so beyond current state-of-the-art isn't really plausible to me.
edit: I haven't listened to any of their other stuff (apparently there's a Dudesy podcast), but I peeped their fan group and it's basically an open secret and running joke that the whole "AI" gimmick is a bit of kayfabe.
edit2: Listening to it some more, even the vocal synthesis aspect is hard to buy. It's just too natural. More likely it's Sasso or a decent Carlin impersonator they hired reading it live and then run through an AI voice-changing model like RVC or So-Vits-SVC. There are a few weird emphases and clipping that give me pause, but overall it sounds more like a human base recording than something entirely generated.
I tried to look more into it, but it's somewhat difficult. Dudesy has a post-post-post-post ironic vibe, so it's hard to know when they're trolling, trolling trolling, or being legit. Either way I'm not sure to what extent even they are claiming that this is written by some kind of LLM to begin with. Certainly the voice synthesis is from similar tech to 11labs.
For the voice, I think in the end it's similar to the relationship digital audio mixers have with real instruments. Today, you can make an orchestral song with just your computer and installation of logic pro (or whatever software is of your choice). Before, you'd, y'know, need a whole orchestra. Of course, it's not the same thing - it's just different, neither better nor worse. But you'd still need to be the one composing it.
It's the same now - human voices are just within the realm of what can be simulated now. They are another instrument you can use digitally, just as piano is an instrument we can simulate with high accuracy digitally.
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As an aside I think the callout from his daughter really backfired, it’s having a huge Streisand effect, I went from never hearing about dudesy to reading about it every social media and hearing several people I know talk about watching it.
It's interesting to contrast this with the flare-up over that wannabe Robin Williams impersonator that posted some "test footage" to YouTube a few years ago, apparently in hopes of scoring a biopic deal. His daughter was similarly unhappy to see it, but the public reaction was much more "I understand she dislikes it but it's still really cool and delightful" rather than "this is a loathsome abomination and I hope the people behind it die of sepsis" (an actual comment I saw on another site).
Personally, I won't care how my likeness and creative work might be used after I'm dead. I'll be too dead to care 💀 But I'm definitely hoping they won't be used in harmful ways. For example, I think it could be cruel for my bereaved loved ones to see an AI-generated version of me, especially one done for a commercial project without my family's approval-- which seems to be the case with this incarnation of George Carlin. I don't think it should be illegal, I just think it's asshole behavior towards the bereaved. Maybe pick someone else to simulate, like someone who's been dead for way longer and doesn't have grieving family members still around?
I'm curious which comedian you would find acceptable. I guess there's Laurel and Hardy but they don't really have the cachet among the people who would be likely to watch these kinds of videos. And even older people probably mostly know them from "Who's on First" so copying their style wouldn't be as recognizable for many people.
Yes, and I am ashamed of myself for not realizing my mistake. It explains some of the confusing information I was seeing about them lol I don't really even know much about Laurel and Hardy so I don't know why my mind went to them first.
So take what I said and apply it to Abbot and Costello and then add "oh yeah, Laurel and Hardy existed, too, but I don't think many people would recognize their style whatsoever these days."
I don't know, and I think that if there wasn't any suitable comedian for this project then it just shouldn't have been done at all. Also, I wasn't just thinking of comedians or this case in general, I was thinking of a general guideline for emulating people after death-- basically try not to be an asshole about it. Check with the bereaved, or use someone who died long enough ago.
I know you weren't thinking about comedians, but this YouTube channel is an AI comedian. If they want to advance their AI/use of AI, they essentially have to stick to comedians.
I think that's impressive technology, but a far cry from the real thing. It is not difficult to distinguish it from Carlin's output in voice, timing, and content.
There's a forceful and unrelenting quality to it, it lacks a sense of progression, and the writing is not great. Carlin's act has a nuance, a variation in emotion, volume, and dynamic that this AI special does not have. I do not feel compelled to laugh at all.
The AI seems way more prone to regurgitate Carlin's political rhetoric, failing to insert all the wonderfully silly parts where he wasn't trying to make the audience think. AI Carlin is way more preachy than the real thing.
Carlin did comedy with serious implications. AI Carlin talks about serious stuff and pretends it is comedy. And why is it always so angry? Carlin managed his anger masterfully, letting it build to a powerful conclusion. AI Carlin is angry by default.
I don't think it's disgusting, and I make no claims regarding the morality of the thing, but I do believe it is remarkably artificial and not at all enjoyable. Just a long set of George Carlin clichés that an AI digested and vomited over me.
I don't expect AI content to become part of my comedy consumption any time soon, and there are two reasons for that. First: humans are just way too good at it. There's a long gap to close. Second: I watch a comic to enjoy their performance, and the fact that I am watching the output of a human is relevant to me. I know they're talking from their own life experiences and sentiments about the world. The source of my content matters much in the same way that I can admire Magnus Carlsen's performance even though an instance of Stockfish running on my laptop would beat him every time.
The more I dig into AI-generated art, whether visual or aural, the more I find myself in the "against" camp. But I'd like to offer a more gray perspective of this stance, if folks would indulge me. I promise this isn't a "tech bad" rant.
First, some context and a disclaimer: I'm a software engineer. Learning models and generative AI have already made my life easier, sometimes without me even knowing it (AI-fueled search engines, GH Copilot at work, and so forth). I am not anti-AI. I repeat: I am not anti-AI. In fact, I am pro-AI in many, if not most, contexts. Furthermore, I believe that to be fundamentally against the concept of it at this point is not a far cry from being a technophobe. What we've been colloquially referring to as AI is here, it's not leaving, and we need to learn adapt to it and grow with it.
Now that I've made my stance on AI abundantly clear, I'd like to elaborate on why I really don't like how it's popping up in these sorts of contexts, and it's not because I think it's horrible. Rather, it really rubs me the wrong way because it's... just mediocre. Nearly every type of art produced by AI is just mediocre. Don't get me wrong - it is very cool to see what can be done with it at this point, and from a technical standpoint, it is fascinating in its own way. But "cool" and "fascinating" are descriptors of how the process of this art's creation occurs to me, not my feelings about the product itself. Because the product itself has been, and continues to be... so... mediocre.
Why is that such a big deal? My concern is that, over time, access to AI and generative tools that are creating this kind of art will only increase in popularity, and become far more widespread. The engineer in me loves that. Let's get the tech out there, and let's see what folks can do with it. But @lou mentioned a great point in his comment about stand-up, and I'd extend it to art in general--the gap between where AI is now and where humanity sits now from the perspective of artistic creativity is enormous. As far as I can tell, it's impossibly huge. So what does it mean as this tech becomes more accessible and its use becomes more widespread? It means the world is flooded with mediocre content that is churned out at the push of a button. And that is way worse than straight-up bad content being pushed out, in my opinion, because at some point, the deafening volume of mediocre content that will pile up will inevitably outweigh the volume of humans creating legitimately good art, and people will start accepting mediocre as the new good.
I hope I'm being far too cynical and paranoid here, but there is a part of me that truly fears that younger generations are going to be so thoroughly inundated with mediocre AI-generated art that they'll accept it as the baseline of creativity, and that's the real reason I'm against this. I keep a Facebook account because I use it to stay in touch with family, but scrolling there is nigh unbearable at this point because every single sponsored post or promoted page is some horrible oily-looking AI airbrushing job over a celebrity photo. And here's where I actually hope that the cynic in me is right, and that the majority of the "likes" on those photos are also just AI pushing the content up in the algorithm, but again, what if it isn't, and folks really think that's what quality art looks like?
I want to be clear that I don't fear that AI is "taking artists' jobs" or anything so outlandish as that. Rather, I fear that folks will eventually see this level of quality as acceptable, even good. The top comment in here is talking about how great art only breaks through the pack with luck, and that in the meanwhile, maybe generative content will "delight millions" along the way. I fear that the issue with that line of thinking is the idea that the only thing that makes art worth considering is if we remember it hundreds of years later, and that's a terrible way to consider the value of art. And sure, I agree that there were thousands upon thousands of great artists were all still producing great works of art that nobody remembers. But when those people were around and alive and creating art? People enjoyed them in the moment, and could appreciate them, and they were seen and heard, because there wasn't a literal technological wave of mediocrity holding their heads underwater.
Let's tie this back to stand-up for the sake of focus. George Carlin is truly one of the greatest comedic voices of the last several generations. If any comedian has a chance to be remembered 500 years from now, it will be him. However, in this moment, there are dozens of currently-living stand-up comedians I would rather listen to than a formulaic re-hashing of a dead George Carlin. And none of these modern guys will be remembered in 500 years. Hell, most of them won't make it past 10 years in our collective memories. But they're legitimately good, and the gap between them and the mediocrity we've seen out of AI art so far is vast.
Do I think AI and and art should be completely separated? Absolutely not! I just wish we would stop propping stuff like this out there and saying, "Look, I made an art" and then acting like we love the emperor's new clothes. It's not that good, and that's okay. I don't think that's where the intersection of AI and art should live. My hope is that we see true artists adopt and use AI much in the way that forward-thinking engineers are using it. Let's use AI to help re-word a tricky sentence in a novel we're writing, or convey a thought differently. Let's use AI to riff on a musical idea fed into it so a composer can hear a new line and go "Ooh, hadn't thought about going in that direction." Let's stop playing script kiddie with our new AI and drown out the folks putting in the real work, so we can still hear and see and experience that real work years from now.
But doesn't this presume that the world is filled to bursting with excellent quality content? Mediocrity is the baseline from which everything else is measured; it's literally the average. It's not like everything that humanity produces is great and worthy of the highest praise. A lot of stuff is simply, "Meh." I could see an argument that suggests we're already at that point, where the mediocre outweighs the "good" art and that we've probably been at that point there for a long, long time. Yet the world keeps turning, we keep producing.
I bet people said the same thing when YouTube or Vine or any video-based social media started in the late 2000s. It was a long time ago, but I feel like I did see this exact same criticism levelled at video social media, hailing it as the death knell of traditional TV and film and lamenting the poor youth for consuming it, because they don't know any better. And probably the same was said against TV by people in film. And of film by people of theater and stage. That this new evolution and direction of the art is going to ruin the young and the art itself. Did that ever happen? Does it ever happen? If the answer is No, then why would it be different now?
The same was probably said with the invention of the camera. Or the invention of digital tools like Photoshop and Illustrator. Or the invention of Jazz or Rock and Roll. Yet here we are.
I say this not because I'm gung-ho on AI. I don't know how I feel about AI yet. I've tried using it for some things with work and it didn't turn out great. I've messed around with image generators a little, and it was fun for like an hour or two. I'm certainly no great "artist!" On the legal side, I do think there are questions that need to be answered regarding the training sets and copyright and all that.
Idk. I'm interested to see where AI goes. And there probably definitely need to be some guardrails put up for various reasons. But I'm not worried about the state of art and the youth. These things have been said for generations yet they never seem to come true.
This is a valid point at a baseline level, and yes, mediocrity is (and will remain) the majority. My concern is not that mediocre content exists, but it's that the sheer scale of it will be overwhelming. Arbitrary numbers, but if we say that the quality of art creations before the advent of AI tooling was 15% bad, 70% average, 15% good, my fear is that as more and more of this is churned out, things will look more like 1% bad, 98% average, and 1% good. It is simply that much easier to churn out a ton of content using AI, and that content is always just okay. The amount of legitimate art being created year to year will remain largely the same (though I hope it does increase as people learn to leverage technology like this intelligently), but the people who learn to adapt one-click art creation using AI will continue to skyrocket.
Yes, it absolutely happened, and continues to happen. It's just somewhat contained because it only exists within certain mediums, such as a given social media app. And that's ignoring the fact that social media, video-based or otherwise, is absolutely problematic per a variety of studies done on the matter. However, I want to take this a step further and draw a distinction between AI vs. mediums like YouTube. YT is a great example of a medium that can cater to the lowest common denominator, and often does, but the medium itself is not inherently an issue. One need only look at the hundreds of incredible content creators on YouTube to see that it is perfectly possible to create completely legitimate art through the medium, from multiple-hour-long video essays, to legitimate documentary series, to animated featurettes that can absolutely hold their own against any mainstream cartoon and/or anime.
However, this same thing does not apply to AI. It has always been possible to create incredible art via YouTube, from the very beginning. Not a lot of people were doing it, but it was possible. It is also possible to use AI to assist artists creating legitimately good art at this point. But the distinction must be made that it is not possible to create legitimately good art at this point with AI tooling alone. This makes it different than a medium such as YT. I won't speak too much to TikTok (or other shorter-form content) because I haven't spent enough time with it, though much like my first point in my original post, I acknowledge that these things are here to stay, and noise will continue to accumulate there whether I yell at clouds or not. But again, at least those items tend to stick to the one medium / app, and not start to creep into the "real world" and become commonplace. Art as a concept is consumed everywhere, all the time. TikTok, while extremely popular, still needs to be actively sought out to be experienced.
I am not a visual artist, so I won't speak to this too much, but it is an interesting point to consider. My initial thought is that I'm sure there were folks vocally against the advent of these technologies; however, what naturally occurred is that art forms of their own arose out of these technologies because of their natural depth and incredibly high skill ceilings. Again, the distinction between all of these is that there is a learning curve, but someone who is a legitimately good artist who can use these toolings to further their art will be able to make something even better, but the foundational understanding is still that you need to be a good artist to utilize these well. There is no barrier of entry for AI. If you have a phone and can download an app, you can make AI art. As it exists now, it is a push-button technology. I suppose you can demonstrate a skill ceiling by writing better description prompts for the AI's input, but I would still argue that the skill ceiling for it is incredibly low, much lower than what it would take to become even moderately good at any of the skills you listed (e.g. cameras, Adobe PS and Illustrator).
I can speak a little more to this one as a musician, but I'll try to keep it relatively short as this post is already long in the tooth. Reactions to new genres of legitimate music are a matter of taste, and the breaking of cultural norms. This is a lot closer to the "old man yelling at clouds" vibe that I'm trying really hard to avoid here. Jazz and Rock & Roll are both legitimate forms of music, but the generations who didn't grow up with them fought against it because it was so radically different than the music with which they grew up. AI art, by its very nature, is not different. It's reductive. It takes everything we already have, and tries to create something new out of it, and the result is just a reductive, mediocre, played-out version of what already exists. If there is some huge leap forward in AI technology and it somehow invents a legitimately new genre of music, awesome, let's pick this conversation back up again at that time. We're nowhere close to that right now. Perhaps a better analogy to be made when it comes to music would be "DJs" or "producers" writing music which are terribly automated dance mixes of pre-existing songs, and "performing" them at the touch of a button in live scenarios. And, if we draw this example back to your original question, yeah, this kind of content has added a bunch of terrible noise to the world of music, and it has had terrible ramifications. There's so much garbage on Spotify that Spotify is toying with the idea of changing their royalties structure to only pay out to larger record labels. That means that legitimate artists who are trying to get their foot in the door will make virtually no money in doing so, and since they're not making Spotify any money, there is no incentive for the algorithm to boost them up, meaning that we lose even more legitimate art to the buildup of mediocre noise.
I want to end by saying that I am truly interested as well, and I really don't want to come across as some kind of nihilistic, overly cynical boomer here. I do think that AI has a place in art and media; I just don't think that place has been found yet, and we need to be extremely mindful of how we choose to consume art moving forward.
IMHO, a lot of the "mediocrity" you talk about is due to the default tuning and filters of the various established models and not something inherent in the tech itself. DALL-E, Imagen, and to a lesser extent MidJourney and Stable Diffusion tend to converge on a similar aesthetic -- dramatic lighting, HDR effects, a sort of overly-produced, too-perfect stock photo vibe. Sort of like how vanilla ChatGPT defaults to that bland didactic prose style. But with the right prompting it's possible to produce any kind of style; see, e.g., this extensive list of photography styles for MidJourney v5.
Sure, most people will stick to basic default prompts and get the same sort of eerie Stepfordian perfection, which is relatively vapid and uninteresting, but hasn't it ever been thus? Like Sturgeon's Law, except in this case 90% of everything will be brand-safe airbrushed Pinterest-tier crap. But true works of art will always be out there, including works made via AI tools.
You're pretty strictly talking about AI creating visual art, which is a topic to which I can't speak too much in general. But I wanted to echo a thought that I shared in my response to JCPhoenix's comment, which is that, no matter how many filters and tunings you apply to a model, it still ends up being reductive. It cannot create something truly novel, because it doesn't have a mind. I suppose it's the distinction between me looking at a picture and saying, "That looks pretty" versus me looking at a picture and actually feeling something profound. That is what makes something art, and it's a human element that has not been replicated in anything I've seen.
I have seen plenty of visual AI-created art that looked pretty enough. I don't think any of it can be considered "good art." I have also heard music generated with AI assistance that is perfectly passable, i.e. I would have assumed it was an up-and-coming band jamming on some ideas. It's the sort of thing I would expect to hear as the background music of a commercial. Never once have I heard something and gone, "wow, that's good," and I suspect that I never will.
However, AI already can, and will continue to assist in the creation of art in these mediums, and I do think there's a world in which artists adopt these learnings and make something even better than they were able to in the past, much like forward-thinking visual artists were able to learn and utilize Adobe's visual suite of products, or as JCPhoenix pointed out, the advent of photography itself. I don't hate any of it, but I just think it's in a weird place and should not be used as a full-stop stand-in for legitimate practicing of the arts.
I think the total lack of crowd work or understanding of a room keeps this firmly in uncanny valley for me.
This feels like a stand-up sketch written to be part of a film or tv series, and not as an actual stand-up routine.
I feel that this is going to become more common because it has everything you need to hit it big in the attention economy:
May not have been Ai:
https://m.slashdot.org/story/424270