If anything the George Carlin-imitating AI serves to highlight that the brilliance of Carlin was in his thinking, not in his shtick of delivering cynical jokes in his signature fashion. The AI captures the cynicism and the voice and at least in part the delivery, yet it just left me bored. Carlin on the other hand I can listen to again and again.
I guess it's like training a moral philosophy bot. Sure, you could train an AI on everything Immanuel Kant has ever written and it would be capable of delivering an endless series of platitudes that sound like something Kant could have written, but it's not going to become a Kantian philosopher, and you'll be better off just reading Kant.
I mean, the main place i observe this is people commuting on the metro. If they didn't have phones they'd be reading tabloid newspapers.
I don't really see anything wrong with using your phone on the metro. Some will look up art and crafts, some bird photography, others makeup tutorials or video game content. If they can explore their interests rather than just waste their time completely that's fine by me.
Of course it's also a dopamine trap, and Instagram use trends to get a bit out of hand. Still, it seems to me some Lemmy users are a bit too quick to write off "normal" people as broken down zombies.