The estate of comedian George Carlin sued the creators of a podcast Thursday after they claimed they used artificial intelligence to impersonate Carlin for a comedy special.
The lawsuit was filed against Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen, hosts of the podcast “Dudesy,” claiming they violated the domain’s copyrights by training an AI algorithm on five decades of Carlin’s works to “George Carlin: I’m glad to be dead”, which was posted on the podcast’s YouTube channel, where it remains. The lawsuit also says they illegally used Carlin’s name and likeness.
The lawsuit asks a judge to block “Dudesy” — which bills itself on social media as “AI, Podcast, YouTube show” — from using Carlin’s copyrighted works in the future and d ‘require the podcast to destroy the audio and video of the episode.
Danielle Del, a spokesperson for Sasso, said Dudesy was not actually an AI.
“He is a fictional podcast character created by two human beings, Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen,” Del wrote in an email. “The ‘I’m Glad I’m Dead’ YouTube video was written entirely by Chad Kultgen.”
A Kultgen spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Del declined to say whether the Carlin-sounding voice was generated by AI.
Josh Schiller, an attorney for the Carlin estate, said the lawsuit filed in California federal court would move forward despite the podcast’s backtracking on the AI allegations.
“We don’t know if what they’re saying is true,” he said. “What we will know is that they will be impeached. They will produce documents and there will be evidence showing one way or another how the show was created.
The lawsuit is part of an unresolved legal debate over whether training AI language learning models on publicly available written, visual and audio content infringes on artists’ copyrights and authors.
In July, comedian Sarah Silverman joined a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI and another against Meta, accusing the companies of copyright infringement by using her work to train their AI models. A group of prominent novelists, including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, and Elin Hilderbrand, filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI in September. In December, The New York Times also filed a lawsuit accusing OpenAI and Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s major investors, of copyright infringement.
Carlin’s daughter Kelly denounced the “Dudesy” special.
“This is a poorly executed facsimile, cobbled together by unscrupulous individuals to capitalize on the extraordinary goodwill established by my father with his adoring fans,” she wrote in a statement.
“George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead” begins with a voice saying, “Hello, my name is Dudesy and I’m a comedy AI.” He goes on to say, “I just want to let you know very clearly that what you are about to hear is not George Carlin. It is my imitation of George Carlin that I developed from exactly the same way a human impressionist would.
“I listened to all of George Carlin’s material and did my best to imitate his voice, his cadence and his attitude and the subject matter that I think he would have been interested in today,” the voice continues , before a different voice that sounds like Carlin’s. breaking news, including the homeless, police, mass shootings and artificial intelligence.
