TechTakes

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.