Comedy podcast forced to take down ‘AI’ George Carlin special
The estate of George Carlin settled a copyright violation suit against the comedy podcast Dudesy on Tuesday after the podcast agreed to take a video down from their YouTube channel and remove “all known mention of George Carlin [from] Dudesy’s social media accounts.”
The podcast had been under fire for releasing an allegedly AI-generated, hour-long stand-up of Carlin, a famously ribald comedian who passed away in 2008.
Carlin’s daughter Kelly Carlin slammed the mocked-up Carlin “special” in January when the Dudesy podcast released the video, which was titled “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead.”
The allegedly AI-generated special, which mimicked George Carlin’s voice serviceably and his style superficially, was then sued by George Carlin’s estate for copyright infringement.
“My dad spent a lifetime perfecting his craft from his very human life, brain, and imagination,” Kelly Carlin said in a statement. “No machine will ever replicate his genius.”
According to the suit, Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen, who are behind the Dudesy podcast, profited from using what they claimed was Carlin’s likeness and style.
The entire premise of the Dudesy podcast is that it’s written by an AI called Dudesy which has access to all of the host’s data and correspondence.
But after Carlin’s estate sued the podcast, a spokeswoman for Sasso told the New York Times that Dudesy didn’t actually exist and was just a fictional character created by the hosts.
“The YouTube video ‘I’m Glad I’m Dead’ was completely written by Chad Kultgen,” the spokeswoman said, but didn’t confirm whether Carlin’s voice in the video was AI-generated.
After that admission—which lawyers for the Carlin estate said they’d determine the truth of in court—the podcasters barely defended themselves against the lawsuit, telling the Carlin estate within a week of the case being filed that they’d taken down the video and social media content promoting the special.
On April 1, according to a court filing, the podcasters reached a settlement with the Carlin estate. The complaint for the lawsuit asked for a variety of damages including any profit they made off the videos and attorneys’ fees, but didn’t specify what the terms of the settlement are.
According to a proposed order, any third-party copies of the Carlin special uploaded anywhere on the internet will also violate the court’s ruling, though the Dudesy podcasters won’t be liable for them.
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