The property of the comic George Carlin sued the makers of a podcast on Thursday after they claimed to make use of synthetic intelligence to impersonate Carlin for a comedy particular.
The lawsuit was filed towards Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen, hosts of the podcast “Dudesy,” saying that they infringed on the property’s copyrights by coaching an A.I. algorithm on 5 a long time of Carlin’s works for “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Lifeless,” which was posted on the podcast’s YouTube channel, the place it stays. The lawsuit additionally says they illegally used Carlin’s identify and likeness.
The lawsuit requires a choose to forestall “Dudesy” — which advertises itself on social media as “A.I., Podcast, YouTube present” — from utilizing Carlin’s copyrighted works sooner or later and to require the podcast to destroy the episode’s audio and video.
Danielle Del, a spokeswoman for Sasso, mentioned Dudesy shouldn’t be truly an A.I.
“It’s a fictional podcast character created by two human beings, Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen,” Del wrote in an e-mail. “The YouTube video ‘I’m Glad I’m Lifeless’ was utterly written by Chad Kultgen.”
A spokesperson for Kultgen didn’t reply to a request for remark. Del declined to remark about whether or not the Carlin-sounding voice was generated by A.I.
Josh Schiller, a lawyer for the Carlin property, mentioned the lawsuit that was filed in Federal District Court docket in California would transfer ahead regardless of the podcast’s backtracking of the A.I. claims.
“We don’t know what they’re saying to be true,” he mentioned. “What we are going to know is that they are going to be deposed. They may produce paperwork, and there shall be proof that reveals a technique or one other how the present was created.”
The lawsuit is a part of an unsettled authorized debate about whether or not coaching A.I. language studying fashions on publicly out there written, visible and audio content material infringes on the copyrights of artists and authors.
In July, the comic Sarah Silverman joined a class-action lawsuit towards OpenAI and one other towards Meta, accusing the businesses of copyright infringement by utilizing her work to coach their A.I. fashions. A bunch of distinguished novelists, together with John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and Elin Hilderbrand, filed the same lawsuit towards OpenAI in September. In December, The New York Instances additionally filed a lawsuit accusing OpenAI and Microsoft, a serious investor in OpenAI, of copyright infringement.
Carlin’s daughter, Kelly, denounced the “Dudesy” particular.
“It’s a poorly executed facsimile cobbled collectively by unscrupulous people to capitalize on the extraordinary good will my father established together with his adoring fanbase,” she wrote in an announcement.
“George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Lifeless” begins with a voice saying, “Hi there, my identify is Dudesy, and I’m a comedy A.I.” It goes on to say, “I simply wish to let you already know very clearly that what you’re about to listen to shouldn’t be George Carlin. It’s my impersonation of George Carlin that I developed in the very same approach a human impressionist would.”
“I listened to all of George Carlin’s materials and did my finest to mimic his voice, cadence and angle in addition to the subject material I feel would have him as we speak,” the voice continues, earlier than a special voice that appears like Carlin riffs on present occasions, together with homelessness, the police, mass shootings and synthetic intelligence.
