Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

With so much debate about the role of generative AI in the creative fields, self-confessed Luddite Garrett Millerick decided to commission a bespoke model at no small expense. Meet G-Dog 2.0, an entirely computer-generated version of himself. 

It has been trained on 15 years of his stand-up shows, countless podcast appearances and four months of one-on-one interactions (the ultimate echo chamber, Millerick jokes) all in order to replicate the comic's voice as accurately as possible.

After a bit of ‘analogue’ stand-up to explain all this, the Fringe stalwart introduces us to his AI doppelgänger. As anyone who's dabbled with the bots might expect, it's not bad at short back-and-forths, single-sentence responses in the snarky, world-weary voice of its creator. But as the experiment progresses from simple text responses to fuller routines and more complex visualisation, the uncanny valley gets deeper. Its voice is further from the original and its writing drifts from the precision of thought required for great stand-up.

Even if G-Dog 2.0 isn’t up to the main job, perhaps this ‘robot butler’ could help Millerick get over writer's block, or generate the endless stream of viral content needed to maintain a career in comedy these days. There is a towering futility in using one algorithm to feed another, though that’s not Millerick’s focus here.

He’s more interested in the fact that the machine is able to generate full routines - if not necessarily very good ones - within two seconds. The technology is put through its paces with a number of improv-style prompts from the audience, some submitted from our phones, to varying degrees of success. Crowd work is especially stilted - but then Millerick admits that was never his forte either. 

The human comic’s speciality is spiralling howls of intolerant, frustrated fury at the stupidity of the world, and needless to say, his own stand-up work is the best part of the hour. He rages against the travails of trying to date as a divorced middle-aged dad - which makes him a pariah in the app world - or ranting against politics, hating both the left and the right with equal vehemence, and arguing unsentimentally that the only real solution to Britain's woes is to cull the ageing population. 

In contrast, G-Dog 2.0’s offerings – as expected – lack the passion only a human can tap into. And the fatal flaw of turning this experiment into a show is that we do have to watch the avatar’s lacklustre results. A portion of the hour is always going to be a bit crap, pretty much by design. 

But the field moves so fast, so who knows what the bots will be achieving in a couple of years? 

Nevertheless, Millerick believes technology will never be a substitute for human interaction. The bots can never create good art as they cannot know the emotional pain that comes with failure, for example. And what is the Edinburgh Fringe if not a celebration of seeing flawed people make imperfect things, with other flawed humans appreciating and encouraging the effort?

Bringing AI into the equation only makes things worse, as Millerick has learned the expensive way here.

Review date: 14 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard