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.
It was a poor imitation done by a software. They didn’t even bother copying the work themselves. This is the very opposite of creative.
If you’ve ever tried to do voice synthesis you’d realize this was not plug and play. Also if it was written by a LLM, which I doubt based on my experience training them, they spent a lot of effort and time getting it to match his patterns of speech.
From a purely technological view, it was a creative effort and not something cobbled together in an afternoon on a whim.