George Carlin Estate Files Lawsuit Against Group Behind AI-Generated Stand-Up Special: ‘A Casual Theft of a Great American Artist’s Work’::George Carlin’s estate has filed a lawsuit against the creators behind an AI-generated comedy special featuring a recreation of the comedian’s voice.
This case is not just about AI, it’s about the humans that use AI to violate the law, infringe on intellectual property rights and flout common decency.”
Well put.
Eh…. I don’t know that I can agree with this.
I understand the intent behind it, but this specific instance is legitimately in parallel with impersonators, or satire. Hear me out.
They are impersonating his voice, using new content in his style, and make no claim to be legitimate.
So this comes down to “this is in bad taste” which, while I can understand and might even agree with… isn’t illegal.
The only novel concept in this, is that “scary tech” was used. There was no fraud, there was no IP violation, and no defamation. Where is the legal standing?
They didn’t write satire in his style, they sampled his actual work with a machine. It’s not a parody of George Carlin, it’s an inferior approximation of him.
I didn’t say this was satire, I said it was in line with satire on a legal front. And why did you ignore the “impersonator” line immediately before it and jump straight into parody?
They sampled his work, yes. To get voice, pacing, image, etc. they didn’t then have it spit out copies, or even remixes of his previous work, they had it create new content and made it clear it was not him.
I don’t see this as any different than an impersonator watching hundreds of hours of his routines, getting into character visually and verbally, and walking out on stage to do their own routine.
In fact, let me just ask directly: would you be taking issue with this if it was a real human, no AI involved, who had dressed and trained to move and sound approximately like the man, and then filmed it and put it online? Would you say that is illegal?
It is not in any way in line with Satire. They sampled his work with a machine.
If a real human did this, no AI involved, then that human’s interpretation of Carlin’s mannerisms, speech patterns, and humor would all be much more varied than if that human remixed Carlin’s own words and copied his own imagery.
Plus, if somebody came out on stage and started calling themselves Stephen Colbert or Larry the Cable Guy, then guess what? That’s fucking illegal.
It is not in any way in line with Satire.
Oh good, you understood what I said.
If a real human did this, no AI involved, then that human’s interpretation of Carlin’s mannerisms, speech patterns, and humor would all be much more varied than if that human remixed Carlin’s own words and copied his own imagery.
Tell me you’ve never seen a high quality impersonator without telling me you’ve never seen a high quality impersonator. 🤦🏻♂️
Plus, if somebody came out on stage and started calling themselves Stephen Colbert or Larry the Cable Guy, then guess what? That’s fucking illegal.
No, it really isn’t. Why would it be? Is Carlin a law enforcement officer? Is there an attempt to commit fraud I missed in the middle? What law do you think impersonating a random person breaks?
Not to mention, the title description and opening line make it pretty obvious this isn’t Carlin.
I also noticed a lot of skirting around my question with a distinct lack of a direct answer. So I’ll ask it again: If that was a human who put out the exact same video, and AI was not involved, would you have a problem with it? Because it really seems like you wouldn’t.
You said:
I didn’t say this was satire, I said it was in line with satire on a legal front
And FYI, Stephen Colbert got a Cease and Desist notice for being Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report when he left the Viacom network for CBS. Because that is how intellectual properties work, when you make money off of your character or your image then it is your property: that is also the basis for which public figures and actors can refuse images or artworks being used for monetary gain outside of fair use or depictions of public settings.
I could send you a Cease and Decist notice on my finest letterhead insisting that you stop being a stupid overreaching authoritarian. That doesn’t mean a court would uphold it. C&D isn’t proof of anything.
Wouldn’t the issue there be the fact that “of the Colbert Report” is using the actual name of the show in a way that would create profit for him? This, profiting off of someone else’s IP? It’s not the fact that he is “Stephen Colbert”. It’s the part that isn’t his name.
So you’re telling me you’ve never heard of celebrity impersonators? Elvis would be one of the more famously impersonated, but even living individuals have impersonators. Hilariously, there have been stories of impersonators winning in an impersonation contest when the actual individual being impersonated was also in the contest.
You k ow what doesn’t happen with celebrity impersonators? They don’t get arrested or successfully sued. Because there’s nothing illegal about it.
Now, the CnD Colbert got is a different story. He likely signed paperwork saying he wouldn’t “be the character” after leaving. Not to mention, he was the literal actor who portrays that character.
On the other hand, you notice how SNL doesn’t get sued for their impersonations?…
Are you noticing a theme yet?
Because I am. You just won’t answer my simple question. So let me jump to the assumption that you’d be fine with it if it was fully human made. That begs the question, why is AI different? If the poster came out tomorrow with proof AI was not involved, why would it suddenly be okay?
I remember when impersonators, such as Rich Little, used to show up on TV. Their whole bit was the skill it took to do the impersonations, not so much what they said. And I don’t remember any instance of them only doing one person. There are single impersonation shows, like a Judy Garland concert, but I am not sure where that falls legally.
When I think of impersonator personally, I go straight to Elvis impersonators. It’s a running joke in movies, they’re all over Las Vegas, and you can rent an Elvis impersonator for various events, including weddings, in just about any major city.
They trained the AI on his material. That’s theft of IP without a license or agreement.
So any human comedian listening and learning from other comedians is also STEALING the intellectual PROPERTY of them? That is very incendiary language btw.
Morally this imho comes down to a workers right issue. So there are legitimate reasons to argue that AI should not take our jobs. A kind of socialist market protection act.
But to use intellectual property in this case is just asking to make anything “Disney like” to be treated as copyright by Disney.
PS: BTW actually listen to the video https://youtu.be/2kONMe7YnO8 it is eerily good.
Presumably they paid to see the show each time they wanted to go learn from him. Also, it’s extremely poor form to copy jokes. Learning the art of telling jokes like using callbacks wouldn’t require watching solely one comedian either.
No matter how much they say this isn’t Carlin, the entire selling premise here is that it’s Carlin.
The AI didn’t copy jokes, it learned how to generate jokes just like Carlin. The point of this impersonation for me is to be able to actually compare it to Carin, as a benchmark.
It seems also clear that while this is mediocre at best, the next versions of AI will become as good as, and then better than Carlin. And then better than any human comedian could ever be. Might take a while but no doubt in my mind we’ll get there sooner than later. So then they’ll use artificial persona that become brands and are fully owned by corporation.
And they’ll not just be insanely funny, they’ll also become incredibly good at propaganda and reprogramming human minds to their master’s agenda. Now a human entertainer at least has to have some humanity.
My point is that IP law is the WORST thing you can use to try to limit AIs. The hurt feelings or lost moneys of Carlin’s heirs or other corporations are so utterly irrelevant in regards to the repercussions of this issue.
Machines aren’t people. Machines don’t learn. Machines copy data, manipulate and replicate it. That is copyright infringement. The laws for Machine duplication don’t apply to human learning.
Machines don’t learn.
It’s called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning
That they actually learned to do creative writing is the shocking thing. Mediocre so far, but they will improve. And denial won’t help.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalize to unseen data, and thus perform tasks without explicit instructions. Recently, generative artificial neural networks have been able to surpass many previous approaches in performance. Machine learning approaches have been applied to many fields including large language models, computer vision, speech recognition, email filtering, agriculture, and medicine, where it is too costly to develop algorithms to perform the needed tasks. ML is known in its application across business problems under the name predictive analytics. Although not all machine learning is statistically based, computational statistics is an important source of the field’s methods.
I teared up listening to this special. It was like he was still alive. A lot of good material and definitely in his spirit. People who want to lock up our culture behind paywalls can get bent.
“That use AI to violate the law”
Watch out impressionists. If you get too good you might become a lawbreaker. The AI hysteria is beyond absurd.
That’s not what this is about though.
AI should follow the standard norms and conventions we’ve established up to this point. Which, generally speaking, would prohibit using someone’s likeness without their consent to make a profit, and also not using the likeness of a well loved, dead man, in such a trashy way.
You know, basic human decency.
“using someone’s likeness”
Again, so someone can’t do a gilbert gottfried impression while doing their own stand-up? That’s illegal to do because their voice itself is copyright protected? Man, all these AI covers on Youtube are fucked then.
You completely misunderstand the law to appeal to emotion which continues to feed into the hysteria around generative AI. Photoshop isn’t illegal, generative AI isn’t illegal, doing impressions isn’t illegal. This would be no different if someone took that same script and did their best George Carlin impression.
The appellate court ruled that the voice of someone famous as a singer is distinctive to their person and image and therefore, as a part of their identity, it is unlawful to imitate their voice without express consent and approval. The appellate court reversed the district courts decision and ruled in favor of Midler, indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
I don’t see why that wouldn’t apply to a comedian as well.
The court might rule in favor of his estate for this reason. But honestly, I do think there are differences to a singer (whose voice becomes an instrument in their song) and a comedian (whose voice is used to communicate the ideas and jokes they want to tell). A different voice could tell the same jokes as Carlin, and if done with the same level of care to communicate his emotions and cadence, could effectively create the same feeling as we know it. A song could literally be a different song if you swap an instrument. But the courts will have to rule.
Carlin had a unique and distinctive voice and cadence, which was absolutely part of his act. And this fake album imitates it.
I don’t disagree with that, but such differences can matter when it comes to ruling if imitation and parody are allowed, and to what extent.
Building those isn’t illegal. Using them to make a profit without consent is. The law is very clear here. This is what is at issue here.
Right so every single song, every use of Frank Sinatra’s voice on YouTube to cover songs is wildly illegal, yes? They have ads, they’re doing it for profit. The people who made the special didn’t sell access to it so how’d they make money? Same way I’d imagine.
those the use ai for it, yes actually. in fact, if we’re following the letter of copyright law, almost every meme is technically illegal.
Okay then let’s focus on impressionists. Grapple with that for a minute because you seem to be avoiding it. If someone does a stand-up special they wrote and did a highly accurate impression of George Carlin, why is that illegal?
While the estate might have a fair case on whether or not this is infringement (courts simply have not ruled enough on AI to say) I think this is a silly way to characterize the people that made this. If you wanted to turn a profit from a dead person using AI to copy their likeness, why Carlin? He’s beloved for sure, but he’s not very ‘marketable’. Without context to those who have never seen him before, he could be seen as a grumpy old man making aggressive statements. There are far better dead people to pick if your goal was to make a profit.
Which leads me to believe that he was in part picked because the creators of the video were genuine fans of his work (the video even states so as far as I remember) and felt they could provide enough originality and creativity. George Carlin is truly a one of a kind comedian whose words and jokes still inspire people today. Due to this video (and to an extent, the controversy), some people will be reminded of him. Some people will learn about him for the first time. His unique view on things can be extended to modern times. A view I feel we desperately need at times. None of that would be an issue as long as it was made excessively clear that this isn’t actually George. That it’s a homage. Which these people did. As far as I see, they could be legally in the wrong, but morally in the right. It’s unfair to characterize them purely by their usage of AI.
He’s beloved for sure, but he’s not very ‘marketable’.
Au contraire, literally the only reason cares about this or is paying any attention to it at all is because George Carlin is widely recognized (correctly IMO) as one of the best standup comedians that have ever lived.
If you took this same (tepid, garbage IMO) routine, removed Carlin’s “impersonation” (an interesting linguistic side point that George may have found interesting is how can something be an “impersonation” if there’s no person involved?) you’d get a lukewarm reception similar to the ones to the material the writers have had previously. But since it’s Carlin, you get headline after headline and even people who believe (my own brother for instance) that this material was actually composed in its full, hour-long, coherent format by some machine approximating George Carlin.
I agree that George is one of the best stand up comedians, but that doesn’t change that his material is very much counter-culture. It’s made to rub people the wrong way, to get them to think differently about why things are the way they are. That makes it inherently not as good of a money maker as someone who tries to please all sides in their jokes. I’d like to believe if he was alive today he would do a beautiful piece on AI.
In your second point I have to wonder though. Who made it a headline? Who decided this was worth bringing attention to? Clearly, the controversy did not come from them. There is nothing controversial about an homage. But it is AI, and that got people talking. You can be of the opinion they did it for that reason, but I would argue that they simply expected the same lukewarm reception they had always gotten. After all, people don’t often solicit themselves to be at the center of hate. Even when the association pays off, experiencing that stuff has lasting mental effects on people.
And again, if they wanted to be controversial to stir up as much drama, they could have done so much more. Just don’t disclose it’s AI even though it’s obviously AI, or make George do things out of character, like a product endorsement, or a piece about how religion is actually super cool. All of that would have gotten them 10x the hate and exposure they got now.
But instead, they made something that looks like and views like an homage with obvious disclosure. The only milder thing they could have done is found someone whose voice naturally sounds like George and put him in a costume that looks like George, at which point nobody would have bat an eye. Even though the intent is the same, just the way it was achieved is different.
But it is AI, and that got people talking. You can be of the opinion they did it for that reason, but I would argue that they simply expected the same lukewarm reception they had always gotten.
We can argue their motives all we want (I’m pretty uninterested in it personally), but we aren’t them and we don’t even know what the process was to make it, and I think that is because the whole thing sure would seem less impressive if they just admitted that they wrote it.
I laughed maybe once, because the whole thing was not very funny in addition to being a (reverse?) hack attempt by them to deliver bits of their own material as something Carlin would say.
I laughed maybe once, because the whole thing was not very funny
It was very mediocre but this is basically the first version. Just wait a few years. Computers didn’t win in Chess and now apparently even running on smartphones they beat the strongest players.
BTW impersonation probably makes a much better benchmark to compare the quality.
We can argue their motives all we want (I’m pretty uninterested in it personally), but we aren’t them and we don’t even know what the process was to make it
Yes, that is sort of my point. I’m not sure either, but neither did the person I responded to (in my first comment before yours). And to make assumptions with such negative implications is very unhealthy in my opinion.
and I think that is because the whole thing sure would seem less impressive if they just admitted that they wrote it.
It’s the first time I hear someone suggest they passed of their own work as AI, but it could also be true. Although AI assisted material is considered to be the same as fully AI generated by some. But again, we don’t know.
I laughed maybe once, because the whole thing was not very funny in addition to being a (reverse?) hack attempt by them to deliver bits of their own material as something Carlin would say.
I definitely don’t think it meets George’s level. But it was amusing to me. Which is about what I’d expect of an homage.
If you want to promote your comedy podcast, doing it with a fake George Carlin album sounds like a pretty good way to do it (if you can get away with it).
AI hysteria
This is the concise way of putting it that I’ve been missing.
Using AI to do something that actually intelligent beings already legally do, like impressions and parody (with disclaimers and all that), isn’t suddenly theft or stealing because AI was used in the process. I’m really disappointed in the Lemmy community for buying into all this bs
Not trying to be glib but
low effort
That’s another way.
I’ll concede that there is some skill involved in generating some this content, but nowhere near what the humans it purports to replace. And seemingly less and less skill or even intent is required with each advancement. It’s conceivable that someone could mimic real artistic output without actually caring about it.
Not trying to be glib but
Not at all, I think this is the most valid take in the whole thread.
Personally I don’t think automating the process should have all that much of an effect on whether or not it infringes on copyright, but I definitely see where you’re coming from. I can see that being a big point of contention in courts if/when they try to sort this stuff out.
Impressionists have nothing to do with this.
If I scraped all Beyonce’s videos, cut it up and join it into another video, and called it “Beyonce: resurrected”, I’m not doing am impression. I’m stealing someone’s work and likeness for commercial purposes.
Are you sad that your garbage generator is just a plagiarism machine?
Wait did Beyoncé die?
Edit: no.
She still alive? Damn.
That title had me having to check though.
Again, video editing, plagiarism, and garbage generation have all always been possible. All AI did was make it easier.
That’s like being mad at matches because now anybody can make a fire, and by George, one of those fires could burn down an orphanage. But just forget about all the good things that fire can do like cook food or provide heat or forge steel or whatever else you use your fire for idk I’m not here to judge or kink shame you.
If the skills required are the justification for making AI bad, that’s cool. Let me just take away your GPS apps until you become a pro at operating a sextant.
No disagreement here. I’m using GPT for basic programming help.
Better tools, faster, skill bla bla bla. I couldn’t give two shits about the contemporary garbage created. It’s jut not interesting to me. It’s like listening to someone about a dream they had.
“AI” isn’t bad, it’s the garbage that’s being pushed as revolutionary. Nothing has changed. If you can’t write a good poem, even if AI writes it for you, you still can’t write a good poem. And that is what matters to me.
Any image generated by the garbage collecting machine using my input will never be better than my scribble on a piece of paper. Because it’s just not “my”.
That’s a much bigger discussion around licensing.
AIs are nothing without that the precious input that it learns from. That input comes from tons of different licenses and tons of different creators from tons of different countries and tons of different laws. You ironically need an AI lawyer to even start to sort it all out.
Thats kind of a significant issue, especially if you create something that years later, the AI later regurgitates a significant portion or obvious recreation of.
On your last point, for me, the output of an AI is the combination of its prompt, the inputs it has available to it (or at least the curation of said inputs), and the underlying code that combines it. If an individual or team of people create unique and novel art while being responsible for all three, I would say that deserves proper attribution and compensation where appropriate.
But for any schmuck just typing “alien with purpel boobs” in DALL-E is not an artist. I don’t care how many adjectives he uses to describe the nipples, or even if he fidgets with the lighting to accentuate the curls in her mane. I’m not even going to question why an alien species is assumed to be mammalian, even though that’s just patently absurd right off the bat. Like, seriously, the number if evolutionary dice rolls to get from self-replicating protein to a species that generates milk to feed its young is insane. The chances of that happening in two completely different environments is insane^2. None of that matters to me, because that person has nowhere near enough skin in the game to be considered a creator.
You’re understimating what generative AI can do. I was shocked when I realized that GPT-3 was able to do creative writing, something that we thought would be out of reach after things like doing management and self driving cars. Turns out, creativity is what AI can actually do. Watch the video. This is like George Carlin but not using any of his material, instead creating something completely new in the style of George Carlin. They could have used the style and a slightly different voice, but they wanted to make a point here.
If your argument is that minds, be they artificial or human, are not allowed to learn from other peoples works then… well then that is a very immoral argument to make imho.
If you think that LLM has a “mind”, there’s no discussion with you, sorry.
That’s not what I’m saying, What we currently have is more like the disembodied creative writing center of a brain, without memory or conscience but able to do creative writing. But it seems pretty clear now that we will have sentient artificial minds sooner than later.
And the last thing we need is to use intellectual “property” arguments to regulate this.
Actually cutting it up into another video makes it transformative and it’s protected under the DMCA. Thank you for proving you don’t know what you’re talking about. Take care.
Sure mate. You try selling a copy of it.
Likewise. You’re either too dumb or stubborn to even google what “transformative work” is.
Typical “AI” techbro.
It’s possible to get away with quite a lot under transformative use even when it’s commercial, consider Cariou v. Prince for example: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/landmark-copyright-lawsuit-cariou-v-prince-is-settled-59702/
That is transformative work. Remixes are tranaformative work. Impersonations are transformative work.
Using a source and shuffling it around, then repackaging it as “from the same source” is not transformative work. It’s copyright infringement.
I think it’d be entirely plausible to argue that, while transformative, current generative AI usage often falls short on the other fair use factors.
I don’t really see how it can be argued that the linked example - relatively minor edits to a photograph - are more transformative than generative AI models. What is your criteria here?
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You try selling a copy of it.
I really want to drill this home, search YTP (YouTube Poop) on YouTube. The volume of evidence against your claim is enormous.
“evidence”
Take a Taylor Swift song. Sing on top of it. Try selling it with the name “Taylor Swift - I’m Not Dead”
You can sell it as “My garbage cover remix of Taylor Swift’s song”, but you cannot make an impression that this originated from Taylor Swift.
Same thing with Carlin, Beyonce, etc.
It is using the name and identical appearance of Carlin, to appear as if Carlin was speaking himself. A person who cannot read would not be able to differentiate. It is plagiarism and malicious copyright infringement.
Take a Taylor Swift song. Sing on top of it.
We’ve shifted the goalpost from splicing together her entire discography to singing on top of a song. Neither of which is what AI does, or what that channel did with Carlin’s work.
A person who cannot read would not be able to differentiate
A person who can’t read or hear. If you can’t understand the narrator telling you for nearly a full minute that this is not George Carlin’s work then you can’t understand the next hour of the video that uses his voice anyways.
cut it up and join it into another video
If you think this is what AI is doing I recommend looking more into how generative AI actually works. Even if that was what it did, as long as the ones publishing the work are not claiming or leading people to believe that this is Beyonce’s work, then who cares? Should the entire genre of YouTube Poops be paying royalties to all the commercials and politicians they sample and splice?
No, this is not (and never was) how copyright works, nor how it should work.
If you take a second to read the article, you’ll knotice that the title of the supposed standup is literally “George Carlin”.
The video spends nearly a full minute telling you that the channel is dedicated solely to AI content, and that this is not the work of George Carlin. It fills the entire screen with “THIS IS NOT GEORGE CARLIN” several times as the words are spoken by the narrator.
As valid as uploading a copyrighted song to Youtube and saying “No copyright infringement intended” in the description.
The title is “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead (2024)” and it talks about his own death. Even if someone believes in communication beyond the grave to the extent that they could still mistake it as really being George Carlin, it’s immediately explained as AI in the opening segment of the video.
It really was good material and I liked the alluding that AI was as close to heaven as you can get. Too bad it has been taken down. Locking our culture up is a disservice to everyone who has ever existed.
A sticky note is not a legal disclaimer, nor it has any legal value. It’s like writing a “disclaimer” about privacy on your facebook wall. There are many works that talk about death, resurrection, being undead, etc. Carlin being dead has nothing to do with the title being an obvious infringement.
A sticky note is not a legal disclaimer
Have you watched the video? It’s a thousand times more obvious than any legal disclaimer I’ve ever seen. They are not in any way hiding the fact that it is using AI.
There are many works that talk about death, resurrection, being undead, etc.
Talking about death in the abstract is entirely possible while you’re still alive. Creating material ~two decades after your own death about your death and events that happened since then, less so.
has nothing to do with the title being an obvious infringement.
Copyright doesn’t protect names or titles.
I’m torn. I can see why they would be upset. And they may have a case with likeness rights.
But at the same time, this specific example isn’t trying to claim any kind of authenticity. It goes out of its way to explain that it’s not George. It seems clearly to be along the lines of satire. No different than an impersonator in a SNL type sketch.
I guess I don’t have any real problem with clearly fake AI versions of things. My only real problem would be with actual fraud. Like the AI Biden making calls trying to convince people not to vote in a primary. That’s clearly criminal fraud, and an actual problem.
My only real problem would be with actual fraud. Like the AI Biden making calls trying to convince people not to vote in a primary.
That’s the difference between impression and impersonation. My disappointment in the Lemmy community for not understanding the difference is immeasurable. We’re supposed to be better than this but really we’re no better than Reddit, running with ragebait headlines for the cheap dopamine hit that is the big upvote number.
If it were a human doing a Carlin impression, literally NOBODY would give a fuck about this video.
Ive been thinking about this a lot and if you think about this like they are selling a stolen product then it can be framed differently.
Say I take several MegaMan games, take a copy of all the assets, recombine them into a new MegaMan game called “Unreal Tales of MegaMan”. The game has whole new levels inspired by capcom’s Megaman. Many would argue that the work is transformative.
Am I allowed to sell that MegaMan game? I’m not a legal expert but I think the answer to that would generally be no. My intention here is to mimic a property and profit off of a brand I do not own the rights too.
Generative AI uses samples of original content to create the derivative work to synthesize voices of actors. The creator of this special intention is to make content from a brand that they can solely profit from.
If you used an AI to generate a voice like George Carlin to voice the Reptilian Pope in your videogame, I think you would have a different problem here. I think it’s because they synthesized the voice and then called it George Carlin and sold it as a “New Comedy Special” it begins to fall into the category of Bootleg.
You couldn’t sell that game, even if you created your own assets, because Mega Man is a trademarked character. You could make a game inspired by Mega Man, but if you use any characters or locations from Mega Man, you would be violating their trademark.
AI, celebrity likeness, and trademark is all new territory, and the courts are still sorting out how corporations are allowed to use a celebrities voices and faces without their consent. Last year, Tom Hanks sued a company that used an IA generated version of him for an ad, but I think it’s still in court. How the courts rule on cases like this will probably determine how you can use AI generated voices like in your Reptilian Pope example (though in that case, I’d be more worried about a lawsuit from Futurama).
This lawsuit is a little different though; they’re sidestepping the issue of likeness and claiming that AI is stealing from Carlin’s works themselves, which are under copyright. It’s more similar to the class action lawsuit against Chat GPT, where authors are suing because the chatbot was fed their works to create derivative works without their consent. That case also hasn’t been resolved yet.
Edit: Sorry, I also realized I explained trademark and copyright very poorly. You can’t make a Mega Man game because Mega Man, as a name, is trademarked. You could make a game that has nothing to do with the Mega Man franchise, but if you called it Mega Man you would violate the trademark. The contents of the game (levels, music, and characters) are under copyright. If you used the designs of any of those characters but changed the names, that would violate copyright.
Celebrity likeness is not new territory.
Crispin Glover successfully sued the filmmakers of Back to the Future 2 for using his likeness without permission. Even with dead celebrities, you need permission from their estate in order to use their likeness.
Yes, but it’s new territory in the sense of AI and creative works. If I were to use a photo of Tom Hanks for commercial purposes, that would be clearly stealing his likeness. If I were to create a drawing or painting of Tom Hanks, it becomes a lot less clear cut, and the answer depends on weather my work can be considered, “transformative.”
Many people using AI today are claiming that the works being created are transformative; they’re not using a picture of Tom Hanks, AI is creating a picture of Hanks from existing pictures, just like a painter uses references. This is essentially what the creators of the Carlin special are saying in their disclaimer; this is an AI impression of Carlin, not the real Carlin, and should be treated like any comedian doing an impression.
This is the new territory. I don’t know how the courts will rule, but based on the recent ruling against the Warhol estate, there will be a high bar for what is considered transformative.
Even professional impersonators must pay royalties to the original artist or their estate. The Carlin example seems to me to be impersonation rather than an impression.
Yeah, I’d agree with that. I hope it comes up at trial.
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I think it’s because they synthesized the voice and then called it George Carlin and sold it as a “New Comedy Special” it begins to fall into the category of Bootleg.
Except this is untrue. They were very open that this wasn’t Carlin, but an ai learning from him and mimicking his style.
The better comparison is that to an Elvis impersonator who sings song they themselves wrote explicitly in the style of Elvis and try to sound like him.
I think ai changes the game and we need to rethink the laws, but I don’t see this case lasting long in court, unless there is some law I don’t know about.
They also weren’t selling it as far as I know. They put the whole thing on YouTube and prefaced with this is an AI trying to recreate a Carlin stand up set.
I would disagree on the selling point. If you provide something for “free” that is advertisement supported, you sold it to an advertiser.
Is the video monetized?
Of course
It’s worth pointing out here that this script was probably written by a human.
Edit: reporting now indicates that it was human written https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/george-carlins-heirs-sue-comedy-podcast-over-ai-generated-impression/
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If its wrong to use AI to put genitals in someone’s mouth it should probably be wrong to use AI to put words in their mouth as well.
Damn.
snaps
I agree and I get it’s a funny way to put it, but in this case they started the video with a massive disclaimer that they were not Carlin and that it was AI. So it’s hard to argue they were putting things in his mouth. If anything it’s praiseworthy of a standard when it comes to disclosing if AI was involved, considering the hate mob revealing that attracts.
The internet doesn’t care though. If I make fake pictures of people using their likeness and add a disclaimer, people will just repost it without the disclaimer and it will still do damage. Now whether or not we can or should stop them is another story
Completely true. But we cannot reasonably push the responsibility of the entire internet onto someone when they did their due diligence.
Like, some people post CoD footage to youtube because it looks cool, and someone else either mistakes or malicious takes that and recontextualizes it to being combat footage from active warzones to shock people. Then people start reposting that footage with a fake explanation text on top of it, furthering the misinformation cycle. Do we now blame the people sharing their CoD footage for what other people did with it? Misinformation and propaganda are something society must work together on to combat.
If it really matters, people would be out there warning people that the pictures being posted are fake. In fact, even before AI that’s what happened after tragedy happens. People would post images claiming to be of what happened, only to later be confirmed as being from some other tragedy. Or how some video games have fake leaks because someone rebranded fanmade content as a leak.
Eventually it becomes common knowledge or easy to prove as being fake. Take this picture for instance:
It’s been well documented that the bottom image is fake, and as such anyone can now find out what was covered up. It’s up to society to speak up when the damage is too great.
What’s the alleged crime? Comedy impersonation isn’t illegal. And the special had numerous disclaimers that it was an impersonation of Carlin.
Sounds like a money grab by the estate, which Carlin himself probably would have railed on.
What do you mean by “comedy impersonation” - parody, or just copying a comedian?
If I were to set up a music show with a Madonna impersonator and slightly changed Madonna songs (or songs in her style), I’ll get my pants sued off.
If Al Yankovic does a parody of a Madonna song, he’s in the clear (He does ask for permission, but that’s a courtesy and isn’t legally mandatory).
The legal term is “transformative use”. Parody, like where SNL has Alec Baldwin impersonating Trump, is a recognized type of transformative use. Baldwin doesn’t straight up impersonate Trump, he does so in a comedic fashion (The impersonation itself is funny, regardless of how funny Trump is). The same logic applied when parodying or impersonating a comedian.
If I were to set up a music show with a Madonna impersonator and slightly changed Madonna songs (or songs in her style), I’ll get my pants sued off.
Drag shows do stuff like this all the time with zero issue. Artistic freedom is a thing.
This is the sort of thing a person rattles off on gut alone. “Artistic freedom” is not legally defensible - if your work isn’t entirely unique, you need to fit within Fair Use in the US.
If you’re in many places outside the US (like Japan) there is NO Fair Use carve-out to copyright (which is why Palworld may be more fucked than if they were a US company.)
I think your Madonna example is completely fine as long as they don’t call themselves Madonna and start uploading videos on YouTube with her name on it (like is the case here).
Madonna owns her name and trademark but not her tone of voice, style of songs or her wardrobe choices.
In the same way, The George Carlin estate doesn’t own his speech mannerism or comedic style but they certainly own his name.
How is the AI impersonation of Carlin different from when Paramount used actors who looked like Queen Elizabeth or Barbara Bush, or human impersonators who sound just like the real person they’re impersonating (besides the obvious difference)?
I’m not saying Dudesy is in the right. Making an AI system sound like someone somehow feels different than an impersonator doing the same thing. But I don’t know why I feel that way, as they’re extremely similar cases.
It’s because a person is directly doing it. It’s not odd that our laws and mores exist for the benefit of people trying to do stuff.
Even comparing a photocopy to a forgery, at least the forgery took some direct human skill, rather than just owning a photocopier
I hear you, and I thought about that before posting the comment, but does method matter? Does human skill in something make it any more right, or does a computer being directed to do something make it any more wrong? The final product is essentially the same, no matter how it was achieved.
Whether I, unprovoked, physically attack someone or I command my dog to attack someone, I’m being held responsible for the attack. It’s not so much the method or the tool that was used as it is the product, because the act is wrong.
Better yet, to your point, whether I draw the Simpsons and sell that image or print an image of the Simpsons and sell it, it’s considered wrong without permission of Groening.
The question is: Is it wrong to impersonate without intention of deceiving, using any method? I’m not arguing for or against. Simply asking moral questions. It’s a quandary, for sure.
If I were to set up a music show with a Madonna impersonator and slightly changed Madonna songs (or songs in her style), I’ll get my pants sued off.
Wait, so America’s Got Talent aired a crime with this Elvis impersonator?
Granted, the AI Carlin made it clear that he was NOT the real Carlin, but this Elvis is trying to be Elvis. 🤷♂️
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Where’s the line? Were they parodying Carlin? Or just using his likeness? Can Fox News do this with Biden?
This is a far larger thing than just a comedy impersonation.
If you watch the video it’s very clear from the beginning that it’s a fake voice and they used AI to write the jokes. It says flat out it’s not George Carlin. There is no way anyone could be mistaken. Also it only kind of sounds like him.
And when someone edits that part off? What then?
What then? That person may be held liable for whatever crime you believe was committed.
The comedy special not only prefaced the show with multiple disclaimers, but also jokes about it during the special.
If someone wants to edit it to be deceptive, then that’s on them.
The creator would have nothing to do with it.
Whether it’s presented as real seems a reasonable line to me.
Fox News could not use it to mislead people into thinking Biden said something that he did not, but parody like “Sassy Justice” from the South Park creators (using a Trump deepfake) would still be fine.
Fox News could run it with every disclaimer out there and it would still get picked up by every other conservative channel and site as legitimate.
This is why likenesses are protected.
Donald Trump, while president, was impersonated by thousands of people as comedy acts. Some people even had full time gigs doing it!
It’s not a illegal when you are doing it for comedy. Pretending to actually be someone who you are not, is fraud, but that’s not what we’re talking about.
Mimicking someone’s voice or putting on a costume in their likenesses doesn’t make it illegal.
If it did, then Elvis impersonator festivals would be a mass crime gathering!
Right of publicity has been a thing in American law since 1953. Not in every state, but in many of them, including California, where Will Sasso (who is responsible for this) lives.
You do not have a legal right to impersonate someone to publicize your podcast in California. That is exactly what he did.
So it was the fact that he used an impersonation to promote a podcast that’s the issue, not the fact that there was an impersonation? Is that what the lawsuit is going after?
I think so. If you personally made “George Carlin AI Album #2” or whatever and put it on YouTube and didn’t link it to some moneymaking venture, I doubt they would be suing. This is two comedians using a third, dead, comedian to generate revenue for their own comedy.
Even though the AI Carlin said numerous times that it was not the real Carlin?
It’ll be interesting to see how this lawsuit develops.
Ford never said the singing voice was Bete Middler’s in this case- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
Not even for comedy but for art in general.
If we couldn’t impersonate likenesses in art, art would fucking suck. Think of every fictional character who ever met a well-deserved demise that was inspired by a real person.
Hell, look at The Crucible. Required reading when I went to high school. Literally an allegory for the red scare and McCarthy’s communist “witch hunts” going on at the time of its writing.
Not just that, but being critical of the rich and famous, especially high-profile politicians, is an incredibly important part of art. It’s practically the origins of modern theater. And inversely, arts criticism is an incredibly important part of politics.
It’s something the law isn’t equipped to handle as written.
And fear of things for which no law can be ready imagined in their extremes is how I got my current attitude to everything legal.
About the event itself - well, I suppose Carlin himself would be amused by the fact.
Obscenity.
Publically exhibiting a disgusting object,
Ripped it from YouTube last night to add to my media server; curiously it’s no longer available on youtube this morning… (at least the original Dudesy upload I’d grabbed, there’s re-uploads)
I refuse to watch it - I love the original guys stuff so it wouldn’t feel right.
However, is it any good?
Just finished it:
It’s an interesting piece. I’m not sure I’d pay to watch it or any other AI comedy specials (didn’t even watch it via YouTube to avoid ad revenue), but given free access I wanted to at least see what’s up.
It both starts and ends with very clear disclaimers that this is not George Carlin but an AI impersonation of him. The voice is pretty close, but not quite right, though it matches his cadence quite well. Even without the disclaimers, it’s pretty obvious to me it’s not actually George Carlin.
The majority of the video is clearly AI generated art to match the current topic, mostly stills with a handful of short sections of AI people mouthing the words. I’m fairly sure the script and art were curated by a human, along with the overall editing of the special.
Quite a bit of highly political comedy in a very similar style to Carlin, but definitely doesn’t hold a candle to his original/genuine work. It also discusses what he/it is, some of the controversy around it’s existence, and the possible future of AI use throughout all professions, but mainly standup comedy roles and similar (like talk show hosts and news anchors for example)
Worth a watch, if you can keep an open mind and recognize there’s a difference between the original and an artistic representation of him. I don’t think the tools used changes that, especially with it clearly stated as being an impersonation.
Ah… How can I get that file, I haven’t seen it.
It’s called ‘George Carlin: I’m glad that I’m dead’. Have a look around, the original upload was removed, but there are others.
I’ll take Lawyers Maximizing Billable Hours for $500, Alex
Good. I sincerely hope they win.
I’d have sympathy if this was about a grieving family wanting to be left alone, but it looks more like the “estate” wanting money. At least they aren’t going after total nobodies. (Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen)
It’s nothing like Carlin.
It’s theft of his work.
Pick one.
I read it like:
Mimic, pace of tone and body language are parts of the work.
That they don’t hit the main part (I.e the humor) is just the icing.
Perhaps I’m top lenient though.
The problem with that is that you can’t protect “pace of tone” and “body language” under law.
Would you say Palworld is copyright infringement?
I’m just saying that I see that those two statements can exists at the same time without a huge mental leap - not that I agree with it - I apologize if I didn’t make that clear enough in the first post!
Do you think a style is IP?
But that would mean having principles instead of profiting off AI hysteria.
It’s hilarious that I’m getting downvoted. 🤣
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I’ve watched it on YouTube, it’s pretty good. It starts “this is an impersonation of George Carlin”. Wonder if a court ruling would prevent human impersonation.
Why sue? I got through 2 minutes… And the voice was not even close to George Carlin… Like it doesn’t get down his rasp, and sounds like 70s George Carlin
For the same reason that, for example, Kevin Hart would sue someone for releasing an “AI Kevin Hart” album that was a poor imitation of his comedy. It’s appropriating his name and his artistry for publicity. Did the album itself make money? No, because they didn’t charge for it. Did they make a shitload of publicity- thus generating money- for their podcast? You bet they did.
I agree it’s fucked up, but damn if it isn’t well done and pretty spot on. It’s crazy to hear about recent events from the voice and perspective of George Carlin. The special had me ready to pick up my pitchfork.
I watched the whole thing and it was obviously written by someone and dropped through a text to speech engine (or “AI”).
I do not believe for a second that this was written by AI. AI is getting a lot better at writing, but it still sucks when it comes to humour. It’s great at going from A to B with a typical flow of thought, but it tends to struggle with the reverse, B to A, like a punchline and its setup. Since the court case seems to revolve around not the impersonation aspect but instead the supposed training of the AI on Carlin’s works, it’ll be interesting to find the truth in the matter.
