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Comment by whycome

3 days ago

A weird tech-related aspect to this for me. A few weeks ago I saw a viral video of his daughter saying that the final show really was his “funeral” and that he knew it would be his last show. I’m not a fan of his really so the video kinda passed me by, and I didn’t even realize it was AI generated. Upon his death now I’m struck by how accurate the video was. And, how it was emotionally very….accurate? I had internalized it as “truth” because I didn’t care enough to verify. But, in a weird way, it was “truth” even though the specific facts of it may not have been accurate. I don’t know if I have a particular point here, just that the experience of AI infiltrating in this sideways method is …concerning.

This is tangential to your tangent, but in The Decline of Western Civilization Pt. II there's an interview during which he cheerfully and obliviously fails to competently make himself breakfast. I think that might've marked the start of his charming, bumbling, cuddly reality-TV star era. And that scene was at least partly faked in the edit by director Penelope Spheeris.

The AI "voice-over clone" was more like default TTS David_British_1, the emotional video montage and text was what worked on people.

Ironically, the daughter's vlog [2] protesting the first fake "I'm dying" confession [1] helped the story gain traction, there was a second fake video of a random female voice claiming to be her [3] verifying the original story [1] which is probably what you saw.

The point is endless random autoplay is dupe central.

[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@news.time26/video/752576413769616924... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6Zrv3bxKxw&t=10s [3] https://www.tiktok.com/@fdsa32558/video/7525676062676749581