The estate of George Carlin has filed a lawsuit over a fake hourlong comedy special that purportedly uses artificial intelligence to recreate the late standup comic’s style and material.

The lawsuit filed in federal court in Los Angeles on Thursday asks that a judge order the podcast outlet, Dudesy, to immediately take down the audio special, “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead,” in which a synthesis of Carlin, who died in 2008, delivers commentary on current events.

Carlin’s daughter, Kelly Carlin, said in a statement that the work is “a poorly-executed facsimile cobbled together by unscrupulous individuals to capitalize on the extraordinary goodwill my father established with his adoring fanbase.”

The Carlin estate and its executor, Jerold Hamza, are named as plaintiffs in the suit, which alleges violations of Carlin’s right of publicity and copyright. The named defendants are Dudesy and podcast hosts Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen.

  • mommykink@lemmy.world
    523·
    10 months ago

    This is great. There was no reason for there to be any mention of George Carlin in the video’s title, especially not crediting it to him and especially not with a title like that. I’m curious if the creator ever sat back and thought that what they were doing was wrong.

    A real AI comedian trained by living comedians would be an interesting feat, but coming right out the gate with the first real example being such a blatant theft of likeness sours so much opinion people will have on the idea in the future.

    • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      10 months ago

      I agree with you, and think that people are overplaying the AI hype. People think that training an AI is like training a human, and that’s not really true.

      But even if it were, what this guy is doing with his AI goes beyond that. I think anyone would agree that there is nothing preventing a new comedian from binging on all the George Carlin material, then making their own show, under their own name . But if that human literally put on a George Carlin mask and billed their show as “George Carlin”, his estate would (rightfully) get upset, even though everyone understands this can’t be the real George Carlin. Why should this guy get a pass just because he had an AI do all the hard work of writing the jokes?

    • FaceDeer@kbin.social
      611·
      10 months ago

      Did you try watching it? The first minute or so is nothing but disclaimers that this isn’t “really” Carlin, and the AI itself makes numerous jokes about its AI nature throughout the special. There’s no false credit going on here.

      • girlfreddy@lemmy.caOP
        113·
        10 months ago

        If the creators didn’t get permission to use Carlin’s name and image, they deserve to be sued.

        They could just as easily have generated an image to use if they didn’t want to be taken to court. Instead they will have an expensive FAFO episode.

        • FaceDeer@kbin.social
          31·
          10 months ago

          They could just as easily have generated an image to use if they didn’t want to be taken to court.

          I don’t know what you mean by this.

          • girlfreddy@lemmy.caOP
            25·
            10 months ago

            AI can be used to generate images of people. So they could have generated an image, put a fake name - or no name at all - on it, and gone ahead with the “comic relief”.

            Instead they co-opted Carlin’s name and face.

            • FaceDeer@kbin.social
              62·
              10 months ago

              Ah. You haven’t actually watched the video in question, then. At no point did they ever use Carlin’s face.

      • CodeName@infosec.pub
        24·
        10 months ago

        Someone could snip out a joke and claim it was Carlin. Then the disclaimers are meaningless. This happens on the internet all the time.

        Writing a comedy set (ai or not) and then having a Carlin bot read it out and then releasing it under his name is definitely crossing some major lines. I’m not sure what the legality of it is at this point, but if it is legal it shouldn’t be.

        • FaceDeer@kbin.social
          31·
          10 months ago

          Someone could snip out a joke and claim it was Carlin.

          Then that someone has done something wrong.

          I could dig up one of your old comments, snip out something from one of them out of context, and use it to defame someone. Should you be hauled off to court for having posted that comment? I haven’t even done it yet.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
    363·
    10 months ago

    Good. I don’t care if it’s really AI or not. It’s fucking tasteless. Even if they lose this suit, I’m glad they did it just on principle.

    • yuriy@lemmy.world
      7·
      10 months ago

      Hang on, I’ve just assumed this whole time that it was a Carlin impersonator who actually performed the whole special, and then just used AI for the face and voice. Did people actually think this was created by typing some variation of “gimme new george carlin” into GPT or some shit?

  • magnetosphere@kbin.social
    5·
    10 months ago

    I know all the good domain names have been taken… but even when scraping the bottom of the barrel, they could have done better than “Dudesy”. What the fuck, people.

  • guyrocket@kbin.social
    51·
    10 months ago

    I watched a few minutes of this. Awful. This guy should be sued for wasting everyone’s time.