The Weekly Weird #10

Carlin deepfake turns out to be...fake?, crypto pastor stretches the boundaries of metaphor and irony, Shenanada: Shenanigans in Canada, Elon lives in your head rent-free...for now

Alrighty, it’s time for your wondrous weekly whip-through of dystopian happenings!

As always, a big thank you and greetings to our newest subscribers.

Quick plug: Our next podcast episode drops this Sunday, February 4th. I’m editing it now, trying to get it ready for you in time. Jonathan M. Katz joined me to discuss his by-now infamous “Substack Has A Nazi Problem” article in The Atlantic, the fallout, the endgame, the wailing, and the gnashing of teeth. He had tagged me in a response to Episode 104 with Elle Griffin, in which she and I discussed her response to his article, so I invited him on to give his side and he graciously accepted. Make sure to check it out when it goes live.

Without further ado, let’s get weird!

Carlin Deepfake Turns Out To Be…Fake?

In WW#8, we looked at an AI-generated comedy special featuring a simulacrum of the sadly-departed George Carlin. Dudesy, an ‘AI-powered’ comedy podcast by Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen, put out a one-hour “Carlin” show, purported to be manufactured by an LLM after exposure to Carlin’s oeuvre. The ingested/digested/reconstituted material formed the apparent basis for the structure, tone, jokes, and voice in the special, titled I’m Glad I’m Dead, bringing to mind the process of manufacturing a chicken nugget from pink slime by sluicing all the poultry run-off and using advanced technology to turn it into a flavoured object vaguely resembling the original living thing.

The results of the release of the AI Carlin special were akin to the body’s reaction to a duff nugget, namely distaste, indigestion, and ultimately, litigation.

Carlin’s daughter Kelly made her feelings about the special known quickly on X:

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.

On the same day, a brief exchange in the same thread provided a harbinger of what was to come:

Sure enough, within days, the Carlin estate filed a lawsuit against Dudesy, Sasso, and Kultgen, alleging “violations of Carlin's right of publicity and copyright.” Legal document here.

Meanwhile, some commentators, including Kyle Orland at Ars Technica, began pointing out what they felt were signs that the AI-generated comedy special might not have been so AI-generated. As Orland put it:

When it comes to Dudesy’s Carlin imitation, I think the biggest joke may have been on us.

Orland quotes Kultgen talking about how a human might have achieved a similar result as the purported generative AI:

If you wanted to make something like this, this is what you would do: You would start by going and watching all of George Carlin's specials, listening to all of his albums, watching all of his interviews, any piece of material that George Carlin has ever made. You would ingest that. You would take meticulous notes, probably putting them in a Google spreadsheet so that you can keep track of all the subjects he liked to talk about, what his attitudes about those subjects were, the relevance of them in all of his stand-up specials.

You would then take all of his stand-up specials and do an average word count to see just how long they are. You would then take all that information and write a brand new special hitting that average word count. You would then take that script and upload it into any number of AI voice generators.

You would then get yourself a subscription to Midjourney or ChatGPT to make all the images in that video, and then you would string them together into a long timeline, output that video, put it on YouTube. I'm telling you, anyone could have made this. I could have made this.

Much of the response to the special was either from people terrified by what the demonstration of AI capability means for society more generally, or impressed by what generative AI could achieve. In both cases, the assumption that the technology was in fact responsible for the output was baked in. However, a closer look at the comedy special and the context of where LLMs are at the moment creatively indicated a more prosaic explanation.

As Orland writes:

If you think an AI wrote the Dudesy-Carlin special, that [dystopian] future might seem dangerously close. But if a human wrote the special, then it’s just some random comedian riffing on (perhaps underinformed) technological predictions.

Where the rubber meets the road is in the context of the lawsuit. If an AI was used to crunch Carlin’s material and generate a Carlin-like output, then the claim of copyright violation holds much more water. If a human went through a similar process (as detailed by Kultgen above), there is less of a chance that a court would consider that a legal transgression. After all, if that process were to be judged out-of-bounds, impressionists would be consigned to the dustbin of history.

Seriously, imagine if the world was denied the glory of Simon Helberg doing Nicolas Cage. Oh, the humanity.

So it’s perhaps unsurprising that, either because of Ockham’s Razor or legal expediency, as explained in this follow-up on the lawsuit by Orland at Ars Technica, Danielle Del, a spokesperson for Sasso and Kultgen, confirmed to the New York Times that:

“The YouTube video ‘I’m Glad I’m Dead’ was completely written by Chad Kultgen."

So the AI deepfake of George Carlin that blew the internet’s mind for a hot minute is actually a fake deepfake, i.e. not AI, i.e.…not fake? Or fake, but not Carlin? But we knew it wasn’t Carlin, so it…isn’t…fake?

A comedian pretending to be an AI pretending to be a comedian pretending to be an AI pretending to be a comedian was not on my 2024 bingo card, but there we go.

Crypto Pastor Stretches The Boundaries Of Metaphor And Irony

From one type of vapourware to another now as we check in on a case in Colorado brought by the State Securities Commissioner against pastor Eli Regalado and his wife, Kaitlyn.

Regalado and his wife are accused of creating a cryptocurrency fraud whereby they convinced their congregation to invest in a token they created called INDXcoin, which they sold through an online exchange they created called Kingdom Wealth Exchange, in order to take the money and spend it on the same Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous crap with which every scammer seems obsessed. Not a dinosaur egg in sight, just the usual handbags and douche-mobiles.

From the Colorado Securities Commissioner’s press release:

According to the complaint filed by the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, investigators from the Colorado Division of Securities found that from June 2022 to April 2023, INDXcoin raised nearly $3.2 million from more than 300 individuals. The complaint alleges that Regalado targeted Christian communities in Denver and claimed that God told him directly that investors would become wealthy if they put money into INDXcoin.

The Commissioner went on to seemingly imply that the faith-based community over which the pastor presided seemed primed for the type of con he was running:

Mr. Regalado took advantage of the trust and faith of his own Christian community and…peddled outlandish promises of wealth to them…

Exhibit A:

The Colorado Commissioner does not make clear whether part of the penalty they’re seeking will include changing the couple’s surname Regalado (given in Spanish) to Robado (stolen).

In an ironic twist, Regalado’s X account also features a repost of a tweet from the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, about the downfall of FTX capo and ironic-name-haver Sam Bankman-Fried.

You’d think the good pastor would have been more careful or circumspect after the fall of FTX, seeing as he “took God at his word and sold a cryptocurrency with no clear exit.”

But then, when “sowing into God’s kingdom gives you an economic advantage over any one of your competitors,” why would you get skittish?

As he says in the video below, “we were just always under the impression that God was gonna provide, that the source was never-ending, that God was doing a new thing, and that we had nothing to worry about.”

I’ll leave you to draw your own Venn diagram of religious fervour and crypto euphoria.

In the above video, Regalado admits that he and his wife did in fact appropriate $1.3 million in funds for their own use. Half a million was for taxes, but The Lord also of course told Eli and his wife that they should spend a couple hundred thousand dollars remodelling their home, because who wants a servant of the Almighty to live in squalor?

The Lord was unavailable for comment on whether He had specific preferences on wallpaper and soft furnishings.

In the full version of his apology video, not public online at the moment and hence no link, Regalado allows for the possibility that he made a mistake:

“Either I misheard God…or God is still not done with this project.”

Which do you think is more likely?

Besides, everyone knows which cryptocurrency is favoured by God and will provide His elect with endless riches in the glorious hereafter…

Wow, such religion. Much faith.

Shenanada: Shenanigans In Canada

In a new low for freedom of the press in everyone’s favourite ‘Sorry’ nation, the police detail protecting Chrystia Freeland (Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister) is under scrutiny for arresting a journalist for assault after they bumped into him.

David Menzies for Rebel News was on the hoof, attempting to get a comment from Freeland about the government’s decision not to list the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist entity. In the process, a police officer bumps into him by not getting out of his way, then grapples with him and accuses him of assault.

As CBC describes it in this article, the video “appears to show an officer stepping into Menzies' path while the media personality was carrying his microphone in the parking lot of a suburban strip mall. That officer subsequently grabbed Menzies by his lapels, pushed him against a wall and accused him of assault while putting him under arrest.”

The video item above ends with the anchor’s designation of Rebel News as “a far right platform that has been accused of spreading misinformation and disinformation.”

Speaking of getting things wrong, funny story: A federal judge just ruled this week on the Canadian government’s use of the Emergencies Act to crack down on the so-called ‘trucker protest’ in Ottawa in 2022.

According to the BBC, Judge Mosely wrote:

"I have concluded that the decision to issue the proclamation does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness - justification, transparency and intelligibility - and was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration."

You might recall that the Canadian government response to the trucker protest included freezing the bank accounts of participants, accusing attendees of flying “racist flags” for using Nazi symbolism to demonstrate their opposition to pandemic policies, pressuring fundraising platforms to seize donations etc.

One (claimed-to-be-unintended) impact of freezing bank accounts was that protestors’ families were unable to buy food and medicine, and generally interact economically with society.

According to the National Post:

Freedom Convoy organizers testified their spouses were cut off from their money and couldn’t make vehicle payments or purchase groceries and medication because joint bank accounts were frozen.

The role of the government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act was key:

The Emergencies Act allowed not only for bank accounts to be frozen without a court order but also enabled federal and provincial governments to share information with financial institutions about individuals or entities funding the protests or blockades. That information could also be shared with the RCMP and CSIS.

Would that be the same RCMP that tried to charge a journalist with assault after shoulder-barging him on purpose? The very same. They definitely wouldn’t get creative with the way they interpret your financial transactions if that’s their definition of assault, right?

Well, at least the Canadian government took the ruling on the chin and agreed to lay off invoking the Emergencies Act unless there’s a real bona-fide emergency.

Just kidding. They confirmed that they will appeal the ruling, presumably to save face and also to leave the door open for future (ab)uses of the Emergencies Act. Here’s Chrystia Freeland responding to the judge’s decision:

Elon Lives In Your Head Rent-Free…For Now

The first successful implantation of a Neuralink device in a human has been confirmed this week, as per The Guardian and basically all the other news outlets, as well as Elon’s X feed, which is a funnier place to find out about it.

Here’s a video from Neuralink’s YouTube channel explaining the implant.

Charlie Brooker’s series Black Mirror covered a darker version of this years ago in an episode called The Entire History of You.

More recently, investigative journalist Lee Fang also wrote about the implications of brain implants for military technology and warfare. His article is called Don’t Worry, Be Happy: Everything Will Be Awesome. No, of course it isn’t, it’s called Pentagon Report Predicts New Age of COVID Bioweapons and Brain Chip Warfare. And here was me thinking an election year in the US, a burgeoning global recession, and artificial general intelligence were all I had to worry about. Thanks, Lee.

Neuralink’s stated aim for now is to enable otherwise-paralysed people to be able to access the world through technology autonomously, an understandable, worthy, and desirable goal on its face. Whether we’re on the cusp of subscription-based cognitive abilities and memory deletion is less clear, although the financial incentives for and intentions of tech innovators don’t exactly dispel those concerns. Anyone who has been annoyed by paying a recurring subscription for a piece of software they used to own outright might have less than joy-joy feelings about setting up a direct debit to remember their own address.

For now, the world awaits an update on the health status of the implantee, and a meaningful demonstration of the real-world capabilities of the chip. Until then, we can end by rocking out to Sauna Youth’s song, Transmitters, which opens with a killer beat and the following salient line:

I wanna wanna wanna take your call from a transmitter embedded in my skull

Stay sane out there, friends.