The Family of George Carlin Wants to Singlehandedly Stop AI From Recreating Dead Celebrities

Save Taylor Swift was trending on X (formerly Twitter) earlier this week. It was a strange thing to be trending, as it did not seem that the pop star needed saving, but it turns out that she actually did.

As it turned out, using AI, someone was able to create nude photos of Taylor Swift and began circulating them across the internet. The Swifties quickly identified the culprit and shamed him into removing the images. But, in this new world of AI generation, not all celebrities have the backing of a rapid fanbase that can help to separate reality from AI. This is where the estate of the late comedian George Carlin comes in.

The estate of George Carlin sued a pair of comedy podcasters, Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen, who uploaded thousands of hours of Carlin’s standup routines into an AI generator to attempt to emulate the late comics’ standup style and create an AI-generated comedy special.

Sasso and Kultgen released the new George Carlin comedy special, “I’m Glad I’m Dead,” on their January 9 Dudesy podcast. The Carlin Estate filed a complaint in the US District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles, claiming that Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen violated the right of publicity and copyright infringement.

The AI Adoption of the late standup comics style included jokes about how the late comic would have felt about current events in the United States. The lawsuit in Federal Court claims that the podcast hosts violated his posthumous right of publicity under California law, which allows commercial control of an individual’s name and likeness for commercial purposes.

This case will test just how far artificial intelligence can go and could have far-reaching effects for its future use. The United States currently has very few AI guardrails; cases like this will help establish some safeguards.

The use of artificial intelligence became one of the sticking points in the Hollywood writers’ strike, as they feared that AI would replace them.

The plaintiffs in this case are the Carlin estate, specifically Carlins’ daughter, Kelly Carlin, and his longtime manager and executor of his estate, Jerold Hamza.

This also isn’t the first time that the podcast hosts have been accused of using AI tools to create fake comedy. Former Patriots quarterback Tom Brady threatened to sue the Dudesy podcast after it made a fake comedy bit of him.

George Carlin died in 2008. He had a long career as a standup comedian, but strangely enough, he had a working relationship with the Walt Disney Company. He appeared in The Magical World of Disney television series in 1988 and was the voice of Fillmore in Cars (2006). Carlin was also the narrator for Thomas and Friends. 

We will continue to update this story at Disney Fanatic.