George Carlin Estate Sues Creators Of AI-Generated Comedy Special (hollywoodreporter.com) 118
George Carlin's estate is suing over the release of a comedy special that uses generative AI to mimic the deceased comedian's voice and style of humor. From a report: The lawsuit, filed in California federal court on Thursday, accuses the creators of the special of utilizing without consent or compensation George Carlin's entire body of work consisting of five decades of comedy routines to train an AI chatbot, which wrote the episode's script. It also takes issue with using his voice and likeness for promotional purposes. The complaint seeks a court order for immediate removal of the special, as well as unspecified damages. It's among the first legal actions taken by the estate of a deceased celebrity for unlicensed use of their work and likeness to manufacture a new, AI-generated creation and was filed as Hollywood is sounding the alarm over utilization of AI to impersonate people without consent or compensation.
gee I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
We made use of a bunch of copyrighted material and didn't negotiate with the owner on how we'd use it. So shocked to get sued.
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Shouldn't copyright expire at the creator's death, in the case of an individual?
Re:gee I wonder (Score:5, Informative)
They aren't suing over a copyright, because there is no copyright on jokes `in the style of george carlin`, they are suing over publicity and likeness torts, which are supposed to end when the actor dies.
Re: gee I wonder (Score:2)
It says in the article point blank they are suing over copyright. It makes sense too, they fed a bunch of Carlin material verbatim to not merely "be in the style" of Carlin, but to actually impersonate Carlin. Not in a parody or satire sort of way, but just straight up making a knock off George Carlin.
If the estate has the copyright, and not some media company, this seems pretty cut and dry.
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I'm a HUGE Carlin fan, ever since I was a kid...listening to his albums very low volume with my friends so that our parents couldn't hear what we were listening to....
I'd LOVE to hear new "Carlin" material....but anything generated won't be the real thing.
I definitely understand his estate suing and I support them on this one.
But man..I sure do with we still had George with us present day.
He'd be going off left and right on Biden, Trump, the woke, the pronouns....the l
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Your heavy favoring of right wing buzzwords betrays your true intent behind this "bOtH sIdEs" farce.
You are in too deep bro. Go take a break and write some poetry. There are crazy things going on in this world and you are right to be suspicious of them. You have gone too far when you suspect normal people are part of the psyops.
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Except it did a pretty piss poor job of it. Horribly piss poor. Like if they fed carlin's transcripts and books in to this thing then AI is a total failure of a technology because it entirely missed the mark.
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As is often the case in knock-off products. You know what it's going for and at a glance you might mistake it for the real thing, but it really isn't.
The voice synthesis seemed on point, but the material just didn't do it for me, at least not in the first few minutes. The laugh track might have put me off more, when it happens and I didn't feel like laughing and just knowing that the laughing was added at the creator's discretion instead of natural part of a show made me feel weird about how self-congratul
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If you studied George Carlin as a kid growing up and then became a comic like him, would you be plagiarizing? Should Elvis impersonators get sued?
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Except this isn't a parody or satire, as I said, this is a knock-off, rather than trying to parody or satirize Carlin. To the extent it can be described as satire, the target is *not* Carlin's performances, so the defense would not apply.
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How exactly does one parody or satirize something without having consumed the original work? It's impossible. Consuming the work is what gives one a frame of reference for parody or satire in the first place.
It's not just merely about consuming copyrighted material. See, the problem is that the created image of Carlin is not parody or satire (which would be permissible.) It's an actual impersonation or theft of someone's likeness to create a derivative work. And that's not ok.
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If I study all of Louis Armstrong's recorded output and learn to play just like him, should I be sued into silence?
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If you claim it as your own interpretation of Satchmo's work, then no, though you might be on the hook for royalties if you too closely follow his work. It gets a lot fuzzier if you're trying to claim that it is what he would have done if he were still alive.
Re:gee I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
publicity and likeness torts, which are supposed to end when the actor dies.
That's not true in general. This ABA piece [americanbar.org] says that, as of right years ago, 23 states recognized a postmortem right of publicity. A couple of states have long-arm statutes over it (that hadn't been struck down at that time). There was a federal lawsuit that ruled the IRS can tax the rights in a decedent's name as part of the estate.
Re: gee I wonder (Score:4, Interesting)
Recordings of Carlin's performance are under copyright. And while you can pretty freely do impersonations, as in you offer your own interpretation of another person as to the mannerism, cadence, and other aspects of their performance. The key here is interpretation.
What is debatable is if deep learning offer any creative interpretation in such a performance or if it only takes some data in, churns through the data set, and spits out a synthesis of a performance. That it is debatable is why AI is going to keep landing in court.
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LLM have zero creativity. Not debatable on that point.
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I don't think that is true.
The fact that the output is not 100% deterministic is what makes the case for creativity.
On the other side, imagine a day in the future where we fully understand everything that happens in a human brain and can account for every variable in a person's life. Now imagine that the decisions this person makes could be determined with 100% accuracy based on this knowledge. In that case, would we not be anything more than a computer is now to us? What would that mean for the idea of fre
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A call to the rand() function is not creativity.
Deterministic is not the measure of creativity.
E=mc2 is deterministic. Einstein was extremely creative to come up with that.
If you believe the universe is truly quantum then nothing is truly deterministic.
The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were well unders
Many would disagree with you (Score:1)
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You don't believe in quantum theory?
Not much I can say to that. If you want to be a robot instead of a free willed human being then you do you. But if we truly believe that as a society then all sorts of things fall apart immediately. For example, do we not put criminals in jail because it wasn't their fault? The universe forced them and pre-ordained their crime; not their fault. Does that make sense?
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What doesn't make sense is the idea that Free Will is a magical atom-moving force, somehow neither random nor deterministic, but instead spiritual or something (as if spirits wouldn't also by necessity be some combination of deterministic/non-deterministic).
In any case, punishing someone wouldn't make any sense at all unless there were a large deterministic component to their behavior, and then only if dislike of punishment plays a role in the behavior.
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The fact that the output is not 100% deterministic is what makes the case for creativity.
Creativity is more than randomness. Creativity requires a conscious act of creating something for pleasure (or some other form of subjective experience). Humans and certain animals are capable of that.
It requires will and a state of mind (or being, or experience) to start the process of creativity. Creativity is a state of mind, not random uniqueness.
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This is all true but I wanted to keep it simple and reply only to the rand() question. This is actually my field of study in school. Your description is very on point, thanks for adding on.
Getting into the question of inner states, consciousness, subjective self awareness and so on would have overly complicated the point I was trying to make in response to the other person's post. I thought about going there but decided to stick in a hitch hiker's quote instead. :-)
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AI consistently outperforms the overwhelming majority of humans (sometimes all humans) in creativity tests. Tests judged by other humans. We're in fact running out of creativity tests that AIs can't reliably beat humans in.
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I mean I think it was last year Elvis' estate shut down all the Elvis impersonators in Vegas over likeness rights.
They were able to return but only after paying rights to the estate; and Elvis died 30 years before Carlin.
Likeness rights anymore are like copyright. Artificially extended.
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Shouldn't copyright expire at the creator's death, in the case of an individual?
Not if there is a state after the individual.
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What's that mean? A state? After?
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In the US, copyright generally lasts for 70 years past the death of the author, so Carlin's estate definitely still can assert copyright on his works.
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Dude, it is ghoulish as hell; however, I think it is an interesting attempt. I have not watched it and have no interest in watching it. It seems sacrilegious.
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The corruption of copyright
this stuff would all be in the public domain by now if the upper classes hadn't perverted and corrupted out laws
it's evil and it's theft from all of us and you're all letting it continue
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ctually, copyright was created so the downtrodden artists could no longer be exploited by rich people.
Yeah, until industries were created to 'own' those copyrights so that it is businesses that own the copyrights, not the individuals.
The original intent is fine; however, the original intent has been subverted and that is why you are hearing the words you are hearing.
But keep waving that faux red flag of yours.
Please continue misunderstanding what is in front of you.
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The claim of copyright infringement comes from the observation that they must have created a copy of copyrighted material to feed into the model so it could write new material in the same style. But the legality of that hasn't been settled yet.
Any comedy should think very, very carefully about whether they want
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But that suit is primarily about the likeness. At least that's what the tail of the headline says that was cut off. Now the question is actually: How bad does an imitation have to be that it doesn't infringe on personality rights.
Personality rights, sometimes referred to as the right of publicity, are rights for an individual to control the commercial use of their identity, such as name, image, likeness, or other unequivocal identifiers. They are generally considered as property rights, rather than personal rights, and so the validity of personality rights of publicity may survive the death of the individual to varying degrees, depending on the jurisdiction.
...
Some states recognize the right through statute and some others through common law. California has both statutory and common-law strains of authority protecting slightly different forms of the right. The right of publicity shares characteristics of a property right and as such is transferable to the person's heirs after their death. The Celebrities Rights Act was passed in California in 1985 and it extended the personality rights for a celebrity to 70 years after their death. Previously, the 1979 Lugosi v. Universal Pictures decision by the California Supreme Court held that Bela Lugosi's personality rights could not pass to his heirs.[47][48]
The ultimate question is: Does the First Amendment protect the use of somebodies name and likeness (in voice) to promote a comedy special supposedly written by an AI to be "like he would do comedy
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I believe this is the sketch (Score:4, Informative)
Here [youtu.be]
I've only watched a couple minutes at the time of writing, but so far it's pretty funny.
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There's apparently accusations that it was written Will Sasso rather than an AI. I guess that'll come out in the suit.
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I'd believe it. It was pretty lousy and not funny.
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I have to agree, it's hilarious. I would be utterly unshocked if it's either actually written by humans, or heavily curated.
If AI is involved, is it the voice?
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Carlin: fucking hilarious
This: looks like copy paste from Twitter
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Oh come on, it's classic Carlin.
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What's awesome about an AI Twitter Carlin?
The original was fucking awesome. This bad clone is not.
And I have _no idea_ how bitterness could come into this conversation. That's just a bizarre thing to say. Make it make sense.
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This is also similar to a 20 page list of other comedians I've seen over the years.
The material was not creative. It was forced. It wasn't funny because two words in I had pretty much guessed what they were going to say. When you can guess the punch-line before the setup, guess what...it's a failure. A big part of comedy is "surprise".
Carlin's comedy made you think. This...just regurgitates pop culture in a style similar to a number of comedians.
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OTOH why would Carlin pretend the religion of a politician actually mattered unless they made religion a focus of their politics? So in the first punchline we already have to question: would Carlin have bothered?
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Would George Carlin have bothered to mock politicians over religion and insincerity?
You're kidding, right?
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Is that the content of what the puppet Carlin says?
If so, I can sense a taste of Carlin, but it is lacking the insight that Carlin has. These are not deeply insightful re-imaginations of the social construct, they are surface level observations. Yeah, Carlin *could* be that bad sometimes, but not this
Quote of the Day is omniscient today:
"Most of us, when all is said and done, like what we like and make up reasons for it afterwards." -- Soren F. Petersen.
Re: I believe this is the sketch (Score:2)
I have to disagree. There are many differences to Carlin's style and it's not very funny either. It's funny only if you consider The Daily Show type of humor to be funny. (Which is another clue that it was written by a human.)
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The real crime is adding a laugh track.
Knowing a comedy work is deliberately adding a laugh track makes me roll my eyes so hard. Especially in the context of trying to pretend it was a live stand up performance.
Re: I believe this is the sketch (Score:1)
Can it say... (Score:4, Funny)
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And tits shouldn't even be on the list...
It sounds like a snack!! New Nabisco TiTs!!
Cheese tits, onion tits.......tater tits.....
Performative Lawsuits (Score:1, Insightful)
Performative Politics is something we're used to. Republicans do it all the time. Texas going to war with the United States and all that.
This is Performative Lawsuit. Suing over non-rights they don't have and non-damages they can't prove to what's likely to be two comedians making up a fake AI George Carlin. https://arstechnica.com/ai/202... [arstechnica.com]
But what if it was "real AI" if there really was "AI" and not just clever iteration of spellchecker v2? There is still the right to make impressions of people. Thi
If Only to Distance from the AI (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, it's worth suing if they can distance the Carlin estate from the awful, unfunny fake AI Carlin.
It's not even Dennis Leary-unfunny. At least those sketches were funny from the original comedians. It's not even work water-cooler unfunny, where people repeat things they remember comedians having said and laugh at themselves. The material just sucks.
At best, they (AI, humans, "they") found button-pushing Carlin issues then made the AI puppet say "controversial" things in a way that was not engaging or smart. AI Carlin is a provocation bot not a comedy bot. Dress him in a Bruins jersey and release him at a Rangers game to stir up the fan violence. It's not useful for anything else.
Not useful for anything except tarnishing the memory and legacy of a truly great comedian. Can an estate of dead guy sue for something like slander for dragging his legacy through a high-tech, low-brow cesspool like this?
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awful, unfunny fake AI Carlin
Yeah, I have to agree 100%. Given all the hype, I started listening with the expectation of something truly Carlin-like. I thought I would at least laugh. But so far it's been totally unfunny, with some seriously cringey moments. Nobody who knows Carlin would, even for a second, mistake this stuff for real comedy, much less Carlinesque comedy.
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To be honest, and yes, I listened to it all, it could be called an attempt at comedy. Some of the things qualify, based on structure and how they're told. It feels a bit like someone listened to a lot of Carlin and thought "Hey, I can do that too", and tried to write material in the style of Carlin with contemporary topics.
Think amateur night at the stand up theater. You know the thing, where the artists have to hand out flyers and if they managed to pass out more than 100 they can do a 3 minute routine, un
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Think amateur night at the stand up theater.
I've never been to that. Please tell me there's liquor. Even the worst improv I've seen is better than cAIlin.
Did that work? Is "cAIlin" going to be a thing? No? Ok.
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Of course there is. Why do you think these bars have amateur nights? It's the nights they sell about 50% more booze.
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Of course there is. Why do you think these bars have amateur nights? It's the nights they sell about 50% more booze.
Again, I wouldn't know. I tend to avoid amateur nights. Like New Years Eve and St. Paddy's Day.
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Sensible. Very sensible.
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Yeah, those amateur drinkers make a mess of St. Paddy's day.
They should leave such things to the professionals! :_)
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The entire thing seemed like Gallagher doing a bad Carlin impression trying to make his fill-in jokes in to long-form. Same low-quality jokes, the voice was more Gallagher doing Carlin than Carlin. It was a total embarrassment to stand-up.
He's dead, Jim (Score:4, Interesting)
In fact, he's been dead for more than 15 years. Copyright laws have been stretched beyond reason.
Can we fix this, please?
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Out, foul spirit! Your reason is not welcome here!
May the power of Disney compel you! MAY THE POWER OF DISNEY COMPEL YOU!
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May the power of Disney compel you! MAY THE POWER OF DISNEY COMPEL YOU!
Are you sure you're calling the correct spirits? Last I checked, and I may be wrong, if you want to compel powers from that source, you have to talk backwards.
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It's just an Exorcist misquote. Try not to think about it too much.
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What if I want NO AI representation of myself? (Score:4, Interesting)
What if I wish to ONLY be represented, now, and in perpetuity, by ACTUAL images, writings, and recordings (recorded / created by myself or other parties).
What if I do not want any representation of MY PERSON in an AI fashion?
Live action representations are a different story and have an existing legal framework. And can be very respectful, see Val Kilmer being Mark Twain as an exemplary example of this.
I believe Carlin would have chosen to not have AI representations of himself. But he can't make that decision.
Quality of the content is probably also a factor.......
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"Volo modo repraesentari, nunc et in perpetuum, per imagines actuales, scriptas ac perscriptiones, a me vel aliis partibus conscriptas/creatas)." -- Julius Caesar
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What if I wish to ONLY be represented, now, and in perpetuity, by ACTUAL images, writings, and recordings (recorded / created by myself or other parties).
What if I do not want any representation of MY PERSON in an AI fashion?
All dead people who are offended by AI representations of themselves, please raise your hands. No objections? Case dismissed.
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[...]thanks to our fear of death in this country, I won't have to die...I'll pass away. Or I'll expire like a magazine subscription.
--George Carlin on euphemisms
Guess they couldn't even let him expire in peace.
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Damn, he already covered that in some manner... Thanks for that.
RIP Mr. Carlin.
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Don't other people have a right to free speech, including impressions of you, whether you like them or not?
While i believe AI does not have personhood status under current US law, the person using the AI tool to write the material does and thus this may be acceptable within the eyes o
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What if I wish to ONLY be represented, now, and in perpetuity, by ACTUAL images, writings, and recordings (recorded / created by myself or other parties).
What if I do not want any representation of MY PERSON in an AI fashion?
You'll be dead. You will have no control. You will have no awareness of the situation. What you wanted will not matter to the living except maybe a few personal relations.
On the bright side, you won't notice any of the disrespectful things being done because "you" will not "exist". Do you recall a few billion years ago when the Solar System was forming and the possibility of life was being set up on the Planet Earth? Yeah, neither do I. The situation will revert back to that.
Have a nice life worrying about
Let the dead stay dead (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know what the legal position of Carlin's estate is, but I hope the lawsuit goes ahead and I hope they win. There is something really unwholesome and cringeworthy about raising some famous dead person from the grave so to speak, to push your political agenda. Because, reading this 'skit', it's obvious it was all about pushing a political agenda.
I mean, imagine someone creating an AI likeness of FDR or Lincoln or some dead entertainer or sportsperson you admire, and having them campaign on behalf of Biden, or Trump. Or having them take sides in a celebrity feud and gushing about one of the celebrities while badmouthing the other. Or advertising a business and badmouthing its competitors. Because if this shit is allowed to go ahead, you know this absolutely will happen, sooner or later.
It doesn't matter if this 'comedy special' was really written by a human, or via a prompt to an AI to push this agenda, if you want to push some political talking points, do it yourself. Don't hide behind someone else's fame, especially if this person can't defend themselves by reason of being dead. And I know Carlin's actual material was very political and partisan, but both mainstream US parties looked pretty different back in his day.
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"Push their political agenda"? You clearly haven't watched it. There's absolutely politics in it, but it's Carlin's politics. He was an extremely political person, who hated the police, the wealthy, and (despite being very socially liberal) the Democrats for being spineless and insincere, and the Republicans for what they're bold and sincere about.
AI George Carlin... is an extremely political person who hates the police, the wealthy, is very socially liberal, but hates the Democrats for being spineless a
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What on Earth are you talking about? People have been using the image of people like FDR and Lincoln and famous entertainers and sportspeople bloody forever. The only word you're adding into this is "AI"
I don't know how common it is in the States to randomly use famous people's names and images to plug your own stuff, but a lot of people doing it doesn't make it right. Anyway, there is a difference between slapping a photo or a caricature of someone's face on your product packaging or whatever it's used for and using the actual dead person's voice to say things you want them to say. I'm not actually sure how much it sounds like Carlin, but it's similar enough.
"Push their political agenda"? You clearly haven't watched it. There's absolutely politics in it, but it's Carlin's politics.
Going by this post [slashdot.org] it very much sounds like som
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If you're not aware that George Carlin was a massive leftist but was totally disillusioned with the Democrats to the point of arguing that there's there's little difference in practice between the two (he hated politicians in general, almost as much as he hated rich people), you know literally nothing about Carlin. He has long rants about this.
I *disagree* with him, but it's simply a fact that this is what he believed.
Carlin: “Politics don’t mean nothing, it’s just a game, it’s a di
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He literally did #WalkAway, and I literally just quoted him as stating that he didn't vote and considered the choice between parties to be illusory.
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He literally did #WalkAway
No he didn't. #WalkAway didn't occur until AFTER his death.
I don't know about this #WalkAway thing; however, ascribing its meaning to what Carlin says he was about seems problematic.
From Wikipedia, it would seem that #WalkAway was designed to be #WalktotheRepublicanParty rather than actually #WalkingAway.
Re:Let the dead stay dead (Score:4)
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Why are you so bent out of shape about a demonstration of what AI is capable of? Carlin is a great person to use for this as his comedy was unique and mostly intelligent.
The fact that the act failed tells you all you need to know about the current state of AI.
Let it go... you were told before you saw it that it was AI assisted. Nobody tried to trick you.
Wonder what he'd think about it (Score:2)
I have the hunch that Carlin himself would find it funny. And make fun of the lawsuit.
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Same.
Information wants to be free (Score:1)
Don't think this would stand (Score:2)
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It wasn't even funny (Score:2)
The insult is the estate is taking the thing seriously. Did they watch it? The jokes were trash, it was the worst set I'd ever heard. The voice was garbage too.
I've heard better comedy at open mic nights from guys who were pissing their pants. It wasn't funny, it didn't seem original, and if anything it should prove just how bad AI is at stuff.
Oh get fucked (Score:2)
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