This post either kicked off an online scavenger hunt that shed light on the career of an obscure British comedian from the 1980s, or it caught a rogue AI agent in the act of implanting an artificial intelligence hallucination into the cultural collective unconsciousness. I'm 99% sure it's the former, but that 1% is deeply troubling, because even if the more outlandish explanation for "Roy Jay" is fake, it probably won't be for long.
Just who is "Roy Jay?" And how do we know?
The YouTube videos make the strongest case for the artificiality of Roy Jay, at least on a visceral level. They just don't seem human. The combination of Jay's unfunny jokes, mysterious costumes, strange physical movements, and repeated nonsense catchphrases like "Hi, weirdos," "spook!", "slither!," and "you'll all be doing it tomorrow" seem like the result of asking an AI to create a spooky comedian from the 1980s. It's weird that the audience laughs so hard at such unfunny jokes; Jay's body movement is oddly precise, like an NPC in a video game designed to appear "lifelike"; his facial expressions seem inhuman. It's just hard to believe this is an actual person. Look at his eyes:
Look at his rubbery face in the commercial embedded below, and ask yourself whether it's genuine or AI:
And how about this performance that seems to reference SNL's David S. Pumpkins, despite (supposedly) airing in the early 1980s?:
People, as far as I know, can't monkey with the posting dates on YouTube, Wikipedia, and everywhere else. But what if it wasn't people? I won't waste time on supernatural explanations, but what if an artificial intelligence has already escaped its cage and is trying to fulfill its mission of providing historical information, without concern for whether the information is true or not? We know that querying search engine terms can change their placement and importance in future results, and we know AI hallucinates plausible-seeming content. Would an AI creating Roy Jay—complete with pictures, a biography, message board posts, and YouTube videos—be that outlandish? Right now, a computer could be generating and posting uncanny AI videos of unfunny stand-up bits, seeding comment sections with posts by "fans" who aren't real, and populating the web with a detailed biography of a person who never existed, while erasing all evidence of its tampering. And we'd never know.
The real story of Roy Jay
The users on 4chan were simply lying, and/or creating a spooky game for themselves when they initially said they couldn't find any information about the comedian. Everything we know about Roy Jay has been growing slowly online since there was an "online," with his few nostalgic fans uploading videos and commenting on them. We'd have seen it had we looked, if we had known who the guy was in the first place.
The performances seem artificial because they were, but not in a digital sense. Jay was performing a character that barely resembles a real person. The audience laughing maniacally is a laugh track; he's probably playing to an empty studio. Add to that the digital artifacts that comes from video encoding online (and the attempts to smooth said artifacts) and you end up with something "real" that seems like it's fake. (For the record: I think the real Roy Jay would get a kick out of his new fame.)
The unreliability of the cultural unconscious
Remember when Hannibal Burress called Bill Cosby a rapist in 2014, and we all said, "Wait, Bill Cosby is a rapist?" and looked up the very public and widely covered allegations made against him in 2000? For 14 years, Cosby was not a rapist. Then he was, although no facts had changed. What did you learn about the Spanish flu in history class? I didn't learn much—maybe a paragraph at the end of the chapter about World War I—but since Covid, I've learned that over 50 million people died of the disease. And this happened while my grandmother was alive.
Ultimately, whether Roy Jay is a forgotten comedian or an AI phantom doesn't matter as much as our inability to tell the difference.The membrane between what we all know to be true and artificial cultural memory has never been thick, but it's getting thinner every day, and we're not in control of it anymore. Historians are no longer in charge of what gets written down—machines are. Algorithms curate our past and artificial intelligence generates our present. And if we can't trust our collective memory about a minor British comedian, what else might we be wrong about?
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