Following Lawsuit, Rep Admits 'AI' George Carlin Was Human-Written (arstechnica.com) 58
An anonymous reader shares a report: The estate of George Carlin has filed a federal lawsuit against the comedy podcast Dudesy for an hour-long comedy special sold as an AI-generated impression of the late comedian. But a representative for one of the podcast hosts behind the special now admits that it was actually written by a human. In the lawsuit, filed by Carlin manager Jerold Hamza in a California district court, the Carlin estate points out that the special, "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead," (which was set to "private" on YouTube shortly after the lawsuit was filed) presents itself as being created by an AI trained on decades worth of Carlin's material. That training would, by definition, involve making "unauthorized copies" of "Carlin's original, copyrighted routines" without permission in order "to fabricate a semblance of Carlin's voice and generate a Carlin stand-up comedy routine," according to the lawsuit.
Despite the presentation as an AI creation, there was a good deal of evidence that the Dudesy podcast and the special itself were not actually written by an AI, as Ars laid out in detail this week. And in the wake of this lawsuit, a representative for Dudesy host Will Sasso admitted as much to The New York Times. "It's a fictional podcast character created by two human beings, Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen," spokeswoman Danielle Del told the newspaper. "The YouTube video 'I'm Glad I'm Dead' was completely written by Chad Kultgen." Regardless of that admission, Carlin estate lawyer Josh Schiller told the Times that the lawsuit would move forward. "We don't know what they're saying to be true," he said. "What we will know is that they will be deposed. They will produce documents, and there will be evidence that shows one way or another how the show was created."
Despite the presentation as an AI creation, there was a good deal of evidence that the Dudesy podcast and the special itself were not actually written by an AI, as Ars laid out in detail this week. And in the wake of this lawsuit, a representative for Dudesy host Will Sasso admitted as much to The New York Times. "It's a fictional podcast character created by two human beings, Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen," spokeswoman Danielle Del told the newspaper. "The YouTube video 'I'm Glad I'm Dead' was completely written by Chad Kultgen." Regardless of that admission, Carlin estate lawyer Josh Schiller told the Times that the lawsuit would move forward. "We don't know what they're saying to be true," he said. "What we will know is that they will be deposed. They will produce documents, and there will be evidence that shows one way or another how the show was created."
The lawyers know (Score:2)
Saying an AI coughed up the product of consuming Carlin's work was the death knell of their client, so now it's a human that wrote it all.
I doubt the story is so clean as that, but it'll give them a much better time in court to assert otherwise.
Re:The lawyers know (Score:4, Insightful)
Carlin's material became more political as the years went by.
If he hadn't died when he did, this trend likely would have continued.
Re:The lawyers know (Score:4, Insightful)
His older material was very political also. Take a listen to "AM and FM". He didn't change much, really, but his views crystallized. He became less of a drug fan and more of a cynic, I suppose like most of us.
Re:The lawyers know (Score:4, Funny)
When conservatives realize that Carlin was actually a liberal...
Re:The lawyers know (Score:4, Insightful)
When Liberals realize If carlin stay on views he had, he would be a conservative now. He would be destroying current woke liberal mentality.
Actually, I expect he'd be ripping into conservatives for being too dumb to understand woke reality. He'd be saying things like "conservatives are so stupid they're worried that school children will identify as cats because they have a trans teacher. Fuck you if you think that's a real threat. Woke is about being considerate, but that's too hard for some people to understand."
Also, if Dennis Leary was writing "I'm an Asshole" today, there'd probably be a line, "I refuse to use your pronouns just 'cuz" right before a chorus.
Re:The lawyers know (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, totally, and let's just double check that...
"it's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it"
"These pro-lifers, they're not pro life, they're anti-woman... They want live babies so they can turn them into dead soldiers. "
"this country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free"
"I call him Governor Bush because that's the only position he won democratically."
" ...these dickless lunatics in the NRA..."
" I'm pretty sick of these fucking church people. You know what they ought to do with these churches? Tax them! Tax these motherfuckers. If they're so interested in politics and public policy, let them pay their price of admission like everybody else."
" We can afford to cut defense, we can't afford to cut education."
" The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class."
Totally. The RNC would welcome him with open arms.... maybe he should do that "What Am I Doing In New Jersey" bit where he rails on and on against "Reagan and his criminal gang"?
It's like people like you literally only "know" a single one of his sketches (the one on euphemisms) while ignoring the vast trove of the rest of his work where he constantly rails against conservative politics, and I put "know" in quotes because that sketch was heavily-focused on conservatives and powerful people who try to play down the suffering of the working class, from opposition to the Vietnam war, unavailability of healthcare to Vietnam vets, called out Iran-Contra and CIA murder ops by name, and damned calling slums "economically disadvantaged occupy substandard housing in the inner cities" for people with "a negative cashflow position" because "They're broke! ... They're fucking broke! Cause a lot of them were fired" by "smug, greedy, well-fed white people [who] have invented a language to conceal their sins." Yes, definitely a darling of the conservative movement you have there....
Here's what he thought of people like you:
"You have to be a realist; you have to be realistic about terrorism. Certain groups of people certain groups – Muslim fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists, Jewish fundamentalists, and just plain guys from Montana – are gonna continue to make life in this country very interesting for a long, long time. That’s the reality; angry men in combat fatigues talking to God on a two-way radio and muttering incoherent slogans about freedom are eventually going to provide us with a great deal of entertainment."
(By "entertainment", I'll refer you to his comedy sketch about how he loves chaos and bad news on TV - car crashes, explosions, etc)
Carlin was a disillusioned hippie. Plain and simple - a hippie who had his ideals (he even considered the very concept of private property "theft" [azquotes.com]) but had given up all hope of ever making a better world. His worldview in a nutshell. F* conservatives, F* the rich, F* for the rich once again, F* Republicans, F* Reagan especially, F* Democrats too for being spineless and bought and sold by the rich just like Republicans, F* anyone in power, F* war, F* racists, F* homophobes, F* misogynists, F* America, F* the rich once again, and now let's all just sit back watch the world burn.
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you for your thoughtful comment.
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When conservatives realize that Carlin was actually a liberal...
Imagine how mad they'll be if they ever find out what the Rage Against The Machine lyrics are about
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Is this an attempt at a comedy routine on your own part?
Carlin, not overtly political? You're certainly not talking about George Carlin. Maybe Irish darts player Gavin Carlin? Football player Dermot Carlin? Parisian cabinetmaker Martin Carlin (c.1730-1785)?
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LOL. I swear to Crom I didn't rig this:
Me to ChatGPT: "List a famous deceased comedian whose comedy is highly political." [pasteimg.com]
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Carlin wasn't dumb enough to make his content so overtly political.
I'm guessing you missed this. [youtube.com]
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So can an AI... Without creating a COPY, other than its own MEMORY. Which just happens to be 10000xx better than a human being's... Everyone knew what the birth of AI would mean. And we did it anyway. No crying about it now... Too little, too late.
I don't think this equivalence holds true.
Ask any police detective, District Attorney, criminal defense attorney, auto insurance investigator, cognitive scientist, etc. Your brain isn't built to make copies. Your brain is built to have experiences. Then it adapts to tropisms and ideas abstracted from those experiences. Brains are really sloppy with exact details. Brains do not have the fidelity to copy content.
The AI's memory for the content isn't 10000x better than a human being's. If that is literally tru
Re: If I can "Watch" the content... (Score:2)
The training data for a LLM is not the same thing as the LLM.
Yes, you âoefeedâ the LLM using actual data but it doesnâ(TM)t make the LLM a store of the said data, any more than your brain stores the Harry Potter book series after you read them.
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The training data for a LLM is not the same thing as the LLM.
Yes, you âoefeedâ the LLM using actual data but it doesnâ(TM)t make the LLM a store of the said data, any more than your brain stores the Harry Potter book series after you read them.
Yes.
That is exactly what I said.
Painstakingly separating the two things.
Even including a transitional phrase of "Contrast that with..." to contrast the LLM's production based on its "memory" (which is its own analytical model that does not contain hi-fi copies of the data), with the data in the training set that was used to structure the model.
And then went on to indicate in my final paragraph that the potential copyright violation would occur during the creation or access of the training set itself, not in
Aha! (Score:2)
I posted a comment on the original video asking if the AI had written it or if it was just used to create the voice. It seemed too good to have been AI-written (though it was nowhere near as good as the real George Carlin.)
Well (Score:2)
It sucked either way.
Re: AAI (Score:2)
âoeMechanical Turkâ
Fair use (Score:1)
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I don't see that it ever claimed or acted like a parody *of* George Carlin. In fact, at least from the snippet I saw and read, I don't think it was being a parody of anything. Just because it is comedy does not mean it is "parody".
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Well to be fair the law doesn't specify that it has to be a GOOD parody...
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The law doesn't state anything about parody at all.
Section 107 - Fair use [cornell.edu]
Taking a gander at Section 107, a lot of the language used seems to stab a blade into the heart of LLMs - they'd have to essentially license the works they are training on by a plain reading.
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Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation, 336 F.3d 811 (9th Cir. 2003)
Authors Guild v. Google, Inc., 804 F.3d 202 (2d Cir. 2015)
A.V. v. iParadigms 562 F.3d 630 (2009)
And numerous other cases disagree with your reading. 17 U.S. Code 107 is general guidelines, not codified analysis principles (Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539 (1985)). Specifically in this regard, courts have cared about whether the use of the copyrighted work is to create a product or service under which any outputs are transform
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I personally wouldn't have a warm fuzzy heading into litigation on this particular issue. I think the decision is going to go the other way on fair use, and probably because of the effect on the industry in question if you can just get a LLM to spit up something analagous to what you used to pay a human to do.
But opinions can differ, yours is a valid point of view.
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You're free to use copyrighted works to create a product or service whose character is nothing like the works you used. And in general courts have been very lenient with such "transformative" character determinations.
But I would argue a comedy special using AI George Carlin who was a stand-up comedian is probably not sufficiently transformative. While 17 US Code 107 is not codified analysis, the four factor analysis is used by many courts as a test for fair use. The last factor: "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work" would be in favor of the estate as it would dilute the market for George Carlin stand-up if anyone could just generate George Carlin comedy specials.
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The law doesn't state anything about parody at all.
Section 107 - Fair use [cornell.edu]
Taking a gander at Section 107, a lot of the language used seems to stab a blade into the heart of LLMs - they'd have to essentially license the works they are training on by a plain reading.
Parody as fair use under 107 was established courtesy the 2 Live Crew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
Note that when the law lists cases of fair use, the wording is "such as", it's not an exhaustive list. Similarly the four factors listed are preceded by the context "In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—", so obviously other factors are expected to be relevant and there's no guidance in the the law on how they a
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and there's no guidance in the the law on how they are to be weighted
No there is plenty of guidance on how they are to be weighted based on case law. The guidance is not one factor is more important than the others. All factors to be weighted according to the situation. What you mean to say is there is no generic mathematical formula for the weight: "Factor 1 is 35%, factor 2 is 10%, etc"
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and there's no guidance in the the law on how they are to be weighted
No there is plenty of guidance on how they are to be weighted based on case law. The guidance is not one factor is more important than the others. All factors to be weighted according to the situation. What you mean to say is there is no generic mathematical formula for the weight: "Factor 1 is 35%, factor 2 is 10%, etc"
"the law" in that context refers to section 107, the case law are in the links. I credit the 2 Live Crew with bringing the case that established the case law, not rewriting 107. I'm sorry if this wasn't clear to you.
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an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect.
There seems to be no intent of deliberate exaggeration or any intended distortion. It was intended as a close as possible to true extrapolation of Carlin to the modern day.
It's not even a matter of quality, it's a matter of there not even being an intent to be a parody. It intended to be comedic, but not as a parody.
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What if Chad Kultgen learned everything he knew about George Carlin from watching pirated content?
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It's fair use because automatic processing of copyrighted data to produce new, transformative goods and services is fair use.
Whether it's parody, that's a harder question. For example, The Cat is Not In The Hat [wikipedia.org], which satirized the O.J. Simpson trial [youtube.com] in the style of Dr. Seuss, was found to not be parody, because they weren't using Geisel's works to satyrize anything about Geisel, but rather an entirely unrelated topic, and the work could just have readily been made in a non-diminished manner without using
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because automatic processing of copyrighted data to produce new, transformative goods and services is fair use.
Where do you come up with this bullshit, really?
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We have case law on that, which he even referred to in the last paragraph. It's not bullshit, it's very famous established legal precedent. If you aren't familiar with the most famous rulings with regards to the subject area maybe you shouldn't be trying to call bullshit on people who are better versed with the material?
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Scroll up [slashdot.org].
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I could not care less about the post of a random ignoramus with a GED in law, really, Rei.
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Whether it's parody, that's a harder question. For example, The Cat is Not In The Hat [wikipedia.org], which satirized the O.J. Simpson trial [youtube.com] in the style of Dr. Seuss, was found to not be parody, because they weren't using Geisel's works to satyrize anything about Geisel, but rather an entirely unrelated topic, and the work could just have readily been made in a non-diminished manner without using Geisel's works.
What does that mean for modern meme images? The entire point of the meme format is to recognize and call out tropisms from one work and apply them to another completely separate work. For example, the Anakin/Amidala scene makes a copy of images from a copyrighted work, then uses those images to satirize entirely unrelated topics - not anything about George Lucas's works. The points raised in the political/social commentary could just as readily be delivered without using Lucas's works, couldn't they?
What if
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>It would all hinge on if the original Carlin shows were legally purchased or not.
>A purchased video would by definition be providing permission to watch that video.
Not really. Just purchasing the show doesn't acquire any more copyright rights than you have originally. Specifically, we are already talking about the right to copy, so this argument has already been addressed.
Fake AI? (Score:3)
Fake News
Fake Facts
Fake Polls
Fake Studies
Fake Experts
Fake Scientists
Fake Lawyers
and now for something almost completely different
Fake AI
DISCLAIMER: This post was written by AI (or was it?)
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing new. Google "Mechanical Turk".
We Knew? (Score:2)
On the last article I left a comment about how I used to love Will Saso.
That wasn't some random psychic revelation - it was printed in some article (TFA?)
Wait, is this lawsuit really about what the journalist thinks it's about?
The AI is but one element... (Score:2)
It pitched itself as "Carlin", not in a parody or satirical way, but straight up claiming to be the definitive "if Carlin were alive, here's what his sincere take would be, as realized by an impartial AI". Not "I'm a Carlin-style comedian and this is what *I* think, but literally putting words in Carlin's dead mouth. While trying to claim AI to legitimize your claim that "It's not me, it's Carlin, as an impartial AI extrapolated from his work". Even if the script was written by humans, the AI claim was u
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Meh, if I make a video of a sock puppet that says "Hey I'm George Carlin! Look at me! Fuck shit damn asshole bastard bitch!" is that really any different...
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You got the list wrong.
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Sorry, may I amend my obscenity: motherfucker, tits, shit, piss, fuck, cunt and cocksucker.
I must've been thinking of something else
Am I the only one...? (Score:3)
Am I the only one who read that this guy said only the video was AI? Dude wrote and voiced it himself, and said as much, somewhere. He only used AI to create the video.
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Nah, many of us noticed it and even tried to tell folks that it was not AI scripted. LLMs suck at writing jokes, and the weasel-y way they worded the description of the video made it obvious the only AI likely involved was the voice generation.
Watch out for AAI (Score:2)
Artificial artificial intelligence is coming for your job!
That was obvious (Score:2)
Bwahahahah! (Score:2)
BWAAAAAHAHAHAHAH!!
Only human beings (Score:2)
Only human beings could have made a character as unfunny as Dudsey.
Doesn't matter (Score:3)
whether it was written by AI or a human. The point is that they were intentionally using a different artist's name and persona, without his consent, in order to make money. It's the same thing as making a tennis shoe with a Nike swish on it without asking Nike first. You're ripping off somebody else, trying to profit off their image.
The "comedy special" they created was actually shit, so I totally agree with Carlin's estate going after them. Don't sully George's name with your shitty special.
Now go after (Score:2)
While we're at it, let's charge anyone that does an impression with producing an unlicensed derivative work.
That'll teach 'em.