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 suspect what happened is that Carlin’s Estate has more money they are willing to dedicate to this than the podcast does, they made that clear, and the podcast just took it down because their goal is probably not to prove something about AI.
I don’t claim to be a lawyer and well versed in this, but I’ve yet to hear a convincing argument as to why this should be illegal, but something like an Elvis Impersonator is not. That leads me to believe that if someone is willing to put some money behind it, I don’t think the outcome of the case is going to set the precedent you want.