Stephen Colbert continued to roast Tucker Carlson on Wednesday’s “The Late Show,” this time deploying a rather creative use of the latest fad technology to do it.
Specifically, Colbert used AI to recreate Carlson’s own voice, and made said voice read tweets Carlson sent bashing former president Donald Trump. It’s pretty funny but more important, it’s eerily spot-on.
Now, we’re sure by now you know what inspired this, but just in case, Fox News is being sued for billions by Dominion Voting Systems over the network content that falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen by Donald Trump and that somehow, Dominion was involved. As part of the lawsuit, documents have come to light that have proved deeply embarrassing for Fox, including text messages sent by Tucker Carlson in Jan. 2021 where Carlson disparaged Trump repeatedly.
“These communications, they’re just texts,” Colbert said when he brought the matter up in his monologue. There’s no audio.”
“But, ‘The Late Show’ has used cutting edge AI technology, and this is true, we created a fake Tucker Carlson sound-alike to read his actual words from his actual texts, like when he actually wrote this about the former president,” Colbert continued.
At this point, the AI-generated Tucker Carlson voice read the following: “That’s the last four years. We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on, there really isn’t an upside to Trump.”
“Ow. Well, I know that really sounds like Tucker’s voice, but that’s not really him speaking,” Colbert said after the voice stopped reading. “And the way you can tell that’s not really Tucker is that he was saying what he actually believes, on TV.”
“But again, those are real texts, and Tucker is right, with the former president there is no upside. But, then again there is plenty of backside,” Colbert joked as a photo of Trump playing tennis wearing very revealing shorts displayed on screen.
Watch the whole monologue above. The Tucker Carlson stuff begins about 3 minutes and 30 seconds in.