‘I’m terrified’: what does AI Tom Brady mean for the future of media?
Have you heard the one about the American football player who tries standup comedy?
After Tom Brady’s deadpan appearance in the February film 80 for Brady, rumors swirled that the NFL legend might try standup. His recent divorce, second pro football retirement and forthcoming commitment to a televised comedy roast made the prospect seem believable enough.
Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen, co-hosts of the popular Dudesy podcast, had similar reactions to those of many others. “He really has lost his mind,” said Sasso. “I thought, ‘All right, this is a midlife crisis.’”
Dudesy is an improvisational humor podcast entirely run by AI. Sasso and Kultgen co-hosted a show called Ten Minute Podcast for years, before a tech company they definitely cannot name approached them with the idea of reformatting their odd-couple dynamic around a bot that would be part performer, part producer and all powerful. Dudesy might tell Will to read a news list it had aggregated in the voice of Hulk Hogan, or assign both hosts to see 80 for Brady so they could discuss it on mic.
The upside is it takes all the legwork out of production. The downside is that Dudesy is incredibly invasive: it draws from its human hosts’ emails, texts, social media accounts, and browsing and purchasing histories. It can also call back the hosts’ expansive work, from Sasso’s memorable turn as Tony Soprano in MadTV’s “edited-for-network TV” version of the mob drama, to Kultgen’s long-forgotten feature script called Pizza: The Movie, which is exactly what it sounds like. “We just show up, and it starts talking to us,” Kultgen says. “And we do what it says or don’t do what it says. That’s basically it. We’re in there for an hour and a half and then leave.”
When Dudesy prompted the
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