George Carlin‘s estate has settled a lawsuit over an AI-generated imitation of the late comedian, with the creators agreeing to remove it from their YouTube channel and podcast feed.
In January, the Dudesy podcast released “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead,” which purported to be an hour-long special created by artificial intelligence. Carlin died in 2008, but the special featured a sound-alike voice doing Carlin-esque material on contemporary topics like trans rights and defunding the police.
The estate sued, alleging that the special violated the estate’s copyrights and its publicity right to Carlin’s name, image and likeness.
I tried listening to it. Didn’t last more than 5m. It was horrible. Like a bad Vegas Seinfeld impersonator.
Best thing to come out of the lawsuit is to hopefully make people think twice before pulling a similar stunt.
Good, fuck 'em. Stop ressurecting dead people with shitty inaccurate software hacks.
I looked up the transcript for it out of curiosity. The jokes aren’t terrible I guess; they read a lot like the Carlin bits I’m familiar with. However, I got to the AI part and was like, “nah, they’re pushing it too hard.” I couldn’t see the complaint until I got to that bit, and then I could understand why it made his estate uncomfortable.
If they’d used the AI bit to poke fun at themselves and talk about how AI’s even replacing dead people without trying to push AI as the future, then I’d be confused as to why the Carlin estate is upset. However, right now AI primarily benefits the rich, so pushing AI as the future of humanity is contradictory even within the context of fake-Carlin routine because it goes against his takes about rich people ruining everything.
I have a few questions, and I am honestly asking from sheer lack of knowledge on how to even look this up.
From what I have read, you don’t exactly have copyright of your own likeness, but rather rights to how you can restrict its use for privacy/publicity/commercial reasons. But that applies to you alone. Does your next of kin inherit the rights from you automatically? Can you convey those rights after death? Do people actually do that?
I’m genuinely interested to know if this case was even possible. It’s definitely in poor taste, but despite that it is an interesting experiment and admittedly a good mimicry. Should we expect more like this, or less?
I thought the special was hand written and performed, the only “AI” was the deep faked voice and face.
Every article seems to be intentionally misrepresenting it as AI written, at least in the title and synopsis.
Still a shitty thing to do without his estate’s prior approval, but very very different than its being represented. All because “AI” is the new boogeyman
What is missing is that the podcast originally claimed it was entirely written and generated by AI. They only changed the story when they were sued.
