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.
IMHO, they should have not settled, and won a lawsuit for precedent, this is going to keep happening.
My understanding is that this is what’s happening everywhere. Instead of establishing some precedent, every party is just cashing out with licence agreements or settlements. Basically hedging their bets it seems.
Meanwhile the game plan from big AI is obviously to keep burning cash until they rule the world (or die).
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.
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.
I know the Internet hates AI anything, but I thought this was a fun creative project with a very strong upfront message that it was only an experiment for fun. It obviously lacked his creative genius and sounded like a Family Dollar Corge Garlin knockoff, but for removed sake, suing people for using someone’s likeness that is dead is a shitty precedent.
Imagine if someone made a video of your deceased father with “I’m Glad I’m Dead” in the title where his voice espouses political stances you or him quite probably disagree with.
It’s a worse precedent to set the inversion. Imagine a world where once you die mega corps get to use your likeness to advertise rewriting any legacy you might have had into being “the McDonalds guy”.
Imagine imagining imaginary images of imagination. The Carlin thing was unique and creative. This doom and gloom stuff feels a lot like an affront to his impactful comedic legacy.
“Pass more laws and use the government’s power to suppress scientific advancement, or sue everyone, all to protect the wealth legacy of a famous/rich/important dead person’s family” does not sound like the kind of reaction Carlin would lean into at all.
