The estate of comedy legend George Carlin has filed a lawsuit against the makers of an hour-long video featuring a version of him made using artificial intelligence, accusing them of stealing “a great American artist’s work.”
A voice sounding remarkably like the comedian, who died of heart failure in 2008, appears on a “comedy special” titled “George Carlin: I’m glad I’m dead,” which was uploaded to YouTube earlier this month by the Dudesy channel.
Carlin’s estate filed a lawsuit in California Federal Court, alleging copyright infringement and a violation of the late comedian’s right to publicity.
There is no visual representation of Carlin — the video instead shows a series of AI-generated images — but the voice touches on familiar themes such as religion and politics, while also discussing the comedian’s own death.
This legal action illustrates how AI in creative works is one of the biggest issues in entertainment and comes after a monthslong writers’ strike in Hollywood last year, partly over studios’ use of AI in generating scripts.
“Carlin, one of the most legendary standup comedians in history, dedicated his life to perfecting his craft, only for a couple of podcasters and a mysterious AI to slap together a special called “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead,” without permission, and posted it to Youtube,” the Carlin estate said in a statement to NBC News Thursday night.
The lawsuit said: “Defendants’ AI-generated ‘George Carlin Special’ is not a creative work. It is a piece of computer-generated clickbait which detracts from the value of Carlin’s comedic works and harms his reputation. It is a casual theft of a great American artist’s work,” the statement said.”
The Dudesy YouTube channel is run by comedian Will Sasso and writer Chad Kultgen, who host a weekly podcast of the same name. Also listed as defendants in the lawsuit are a number of unnamed individuals involved in the making of the video and in developing the AI technology. NBC News has contacted Dudesy for comment.
An intro to the video explains that it was made with Dudesy’s own AI tool, which had been trained to replicate Carlin’s delivery and content.
“I’m Dudesy, a comedy AI, and I’m excited to share my second hour-long comedy special with you! I’m calling it ‘George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead!’ For the next hour I’ll be doing my best George Carlin impersonation just like a human being would,” it says.
Sasso said in a podcast commenting on the reaction to the video last week that the AI version was no replacement to the real thing.
“I learned that AI cannot replace Geroge Carlin and therefore AI cannot replace me and my pal Chad,” he said. “It is interesting how heated people get about it.”
In the same podcast episode, Kultgen discussed why the video had caused such uproar, while other AI versions of Carlin had not.
“The other ones, it was just ‘look, we can kind of mimic his voice.’ This isn’t just mimicking that, it’s taking the art form itself, an hour-long of standup comedy, and saying ‘I can do the art form as well,” he said.
Carlin’s daughter, Kelly Carlin, said in a statement: “I understand and share the desire for more George Carlin. I, too, want more time with my father. But it is ridiculous to proclaim he has been ‘resurrected’ with AI.”
She continued: “The ‘George Carlin’ in that video is not the beautiful human who defined his generation and raised me with love. It is a poorly-executed facsimile cobbled together by unscrupulous individuals to capitalize on the extraordinary goodwill my father established with his adoring fanbase.”
