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 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?