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 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 fuck sake, suing people for using someone’s likeness that is dead is a shitty precedent.
I feel like I want to agree with you, but on the other hand what would happen if everyone were free to use any dead celebrity’s likeness any way they wanted? Keeping in mind that Sinéad O’Connor’s estate just sued Trump for using her music without permission at a rally that goes against everything she stood for, if we weren’t allowed to keep a tight reign on these things then it would unleash some truly unspeakable horrors. For example, what if a speech from MLKJ were allowed to be twisted by white supremacists to spread hatred? It could get out of hand so quickly and the good deeds done by these people could be white-washed. I think we just need to accept certain restrictions in order to safeguard the strongest voices that speak up for the rest of us.
This was quite obviously a parody which is protected speech in the US. There is no ambiguity on this, the creation was not some pure AI generation, it was output based on the parameters set by the Dudesy guys, one of whom is well known comedian Will Sasso of MadTV fame.
The anti-AI circlejerk crowd is leaning hard on the wrong example to attack, and the Carlin family has this all wrong.
People don’t seem interested in thinkng beyond a knee jerk reaction against anything labeled AI.
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.
