IP Law Daily, PUBLICITY RIGHTS NEWS: Seven more dirty words for George Carlin: Artificial intelligence uses his name and likeness, (Jan 26, 2024)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

The late comedian’s estate takes aim at an AI-generated “special” in his style.

Two podcasters unlawfully purloined George Carlin’s name and likeness by using artificial intelligence technology to create a video that replicated the late comedian’s voice and manner of speaking, a new federal complaint alleges. The lawsuit, filed in response to a widely-viewed soundalike “special” that circulated on social media earlier this month, labels the theft of the comedian’s likeness “a prominent case-study in a discourse about the relationship between AI and human creativity” (Main Sequence, Ltd. v. Dudesy, LLC, filed January 25, 2024).

Carlin, who died in 2008, is considered by many to be one of the greatest and most influential comedians to have lived. His obituary in the New York Times described him as a comic who “gave voice to an indignant counterculture and assaulted the barricades of censorship on behalf of a generation of comics that followed him.” Carlin’s famous 1972 monologue titled “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” led him to be arrested for disturbing the peace and kept him under the watchful eyes of the law until the Supreme Court, in FCC v. Pacific Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978), deemed his act “indecent but not obscene.” (Although the “seven words” monologue is his best known, this correspondent’s favorite Carlin routine has always been a fairly workaday riff on the value that people needlessly place on “stuff”).

The lawsuit takes aim at Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen, the writers behind the comedy podcast Dudesy. In early January, that podcast release an hour-long video containing the “special” titled “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead (2024).” The video, available on YouTube, used an AI-generated sound-alike of George Carlin to read out and perform an AI-generated script written in Carlin’s style of humor. As an introductory voiceover for the video explained, the AI machine that created the work ingested five decades of Carlin’s original standup comedy routines into a training database in order to generate the material for the special. (The particular AI software behind the video, according to the complaint, has not been revealed by the podcasters).

The complaint alleges that the AI-generated “special” exploits Carlin’s identity for profit—undermining the value of Carlin’s real works in the process. The podcasters sell memberships for $7 per person, the complaint notes, while most of their YouTube videos contains advertisements and offer link to for-sale merchandise. Meanwhile, the complaint asserts, the AI work “misrepresents Carlin’s art, and takes the introduction of Carlin’s work away from where it properly lies—with the words of his real work and the owners of its copyrights.”

In addition to violating Carlin’s right of publicity, the complaint asserts, the creators of the podcast also infringed on Carlin’s copyrights because the AI software they used ingested the comedian’s copyrighted works without license into its training database. The lawsuit seeks actual damages and profits, statutory damages, attorney fees, punitive damages, and injunctive relief.

The case is No. 2:24-cv-00711.

Attorneys: Joshua I. Schiller (Boies Schiller and Flexner LLP) for Main Sequence, Ltd.

Companies: Main Sequence, Ltd.; Dudesy, LLC

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