this post is like a specially crafted basilisk for parts of my brain and soul I normally refuse to acknowledge
if Chad did write the whole of the AI George Carlin thing, that makes it infinitely more depressing that all of the jokes I’ve seen from that shitty special were incredibly bland centrist horseshit, like a meeting room of capitalist shitheads workshopped a bunch of edgy jokes but not so edgy that someone might get offended into not paying them
but let’s be perfectly honest. these fuckheads will say whatever they think might give them a leg up in the impending lawsuit, because these supposed comedians are operating like a crime-as-a-service Silicon Valley startup. they entered the market with a product (the Tom Brady special), pulled out in response to utterly predictable legal backlash, lawyered up, came back with a functionally identical v2 (the George Carlin special), and are now trying to find a legal loophole or create a precedent that’d protect their work on some grounds, regardless of the facts behind how that work was produced. just like Uber entering into a new market, they’ll repeat this process again and again until concessions are made.
I can’t wait for these chucklefucks to drop the comedian act and start claiming trade secrets in response to discovery.
I’ve only read about 30 pages of the report
holy fuck, thank you for doing the legwork on this. the details are fascinating as a case study in how “independent” investigations launder details like this; something that we (obviously excluding our guest gentleposter in this assessment) knew was happening from the general stench of what we’ve seen coming out of Cruise, but it’s still fun to see the company’s strategy of lying like a 5 year old except about a major public safety risk continue to fall apart
this is the exact same Cruise whose CEO started posting absolute bullshit on the orange site about this shortly before being fired. as usual, removing the CEO did nothing -- the whole company's thing is lying their asses off
oh absolutely. it’s very easy to shit on a thread and run from a federated account (which is also why we ban shit stirrers quickly — it’s a hostile network out there), but an account with a track record gets much less harsh treatment in case of any problems because they’ve shown they’re capable of making good posts, and we don’t really want to punish anyone for something that’s relatively minor weighed against their post history. a local account gets a (minor) leg up on that track record, because the user behind it has at least introduced themselves during registration and gone out of their way to get an account here. local accounts also stand out more from a moderation perspective, so the reputation of those users tends to grow quicker too.
haha you’re right, I was hoping one of those shitheads would take the bait and do a “how dare you I’m not a shill, you’re the shill” post for our enjoyment. no such luck now that the cat’s out of the bag on how shitty the Carlin special was though.
I don’t have a suite of advanced analytics (and a lot of the analytics available for lemmy use methods I disagree with) but my admin eyes have been seeing an increase in this type of posts recently. I don’t keep up with reddit anymore, but I don’t think anything’s happened that’d increase lemmy’s organic userbase by a noticeable margin. most likely some brainless hypebros have discovered that lemmy’s the ideal size: big enough to be an audience, but small enough that their bullshit won’t get shouted down. in short, expect more MBA dropouts to get banned for undisclosed advertising
this whole article is an excellently constructed sneer. the more detail I hear about Dudesy (what a fucking name) the more sure I am this is exactly the kind of shitty, hollow grift I pegged it as when I first read about it:
As a product, Dudesy is a deeply depressing attempt to flog technology as magic, where two desperate comedians have their chemistry and flow regularly interrupted by a deeply unfunny third comedian masquerading as an AI. The voice of Dudesy may indeed be AI-generated, but I would wager a human being is either writing or heavily editing a script. Many on the Dudesy Reddit believe that it’s entirely made up, with some suggesting that even the Carlin special was written by Kultgen. I definitely think that generative AI was used here, because even though it's crap, there is somehow a great deal of it.
what I want to know is this:
When you remove the artifice of “Dudesy, the entertainment AI,” Dudesy as a podcast becomes something far more grim — two comedians awkwardly riffing with a disembodied voice, all with the chemistry of two people being held hostage by a contract they deeply regret signing. The podcast has also struggled to retain its initial momentum, with viewership tumbling from 160,000 views on the first episode to around 40,000 an episode for the last 9 months, with the exception of the George Carlin special which sits at 55,000 views at the time of writing.
this stupid fucking special didn’t even do the numbers of some of the niche YouTube channels I watch. its subreddit is absolutely dead, with 961 peak users and barely any posts. how is it that so many folks who watched this garbage and liked it found our last thread on lemmy of all places and felt strongly enough about the Carlin special to post and occasionally lie about it? even assuming the new sort gave it a gigantic boost as a popular thread on a small instance, this shit doesn’t make sense to me.
hacker news really is the cryptocurrency of tech sites: incredibly poorly implemented (dang begs folks to log out when threads get popular), controlled by technofascists, enabled by an extremely mediocre but remarkably fanatical fanbase, and everybody’s abusing ~~amphetamines~~ nootropics. but any day now, they’ll come up with something that solves all of its problems! it’s only been 16 years!
why in fuck is tech like this
fucking exactly, that thread has prime examples of both dang and friends burning receipts, and of the gaslighting orange site regulars do whenever the site gets called out for covering for fascists. there’s also this interesting part where some asshole tried to signal jam the thread with nonsense — they’d reply to every critical post with an extremely long, unasked-for series of infodumps about the orange site’s moderation policies, in an attempt to overwhelm and control the conversation like they do on HN. weird how when you piss them off enough to drop the pretense, orange site posters just start doing fash shit
it’s fucking fascinating how many times I’ve seen the “it’s downvoted, what’s the problem” thing from orange site regulars, when the fash element on that site doesn’t particularly care about downvotes if they can still control the conversation. plus there’s the degree to which the orange site’s shit moderation structure covers up these issues — anything problematic just gets deleted way after it’s had its intended effect. then you watch orange site regulars defend mass flagging trans and antifascist folks off of the site, and you realize none of this is an accident or due to incompetence; these systems are working as intended to empower bigots. flagging on HN isn’t an anti-spam measure, it’s a way to invisibly give control to the worst people on the site.
yeah, I think our guests might be better off spending more time on the orange site with the race scientists, bigots, and other “biases and problems” they seem fond of minimizing, instead of posting here
the only reasonable way to interact with the web is to write a shell script that mails the source to each page you try to view to the 2001 laptop you insist on using even in spite of freer modern options, I said, reaching for delicious foot skin to chew