George Carlin Estate Files Lawsuit Against Group Behind AI-Generated Stand-Up Special: ‘A Casual Theft of a Great American Artist’s Work’
variety.com
George Carlin Estate Files Lawsuit Against Group Behind AI-Generated Stand-Up Special: ‘A Casual Theft of a Great American Artist’s Work’::George Carlin's estate has filed a lawsuit against the creators behind an AI-generated comedy special featuring a recreation of the comedian's voice.
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Impressionists have nothing to do with this.
If I scraped all Beyonce's videos, cut it up and join it into another video, and called it "Beyonce: resurrected", I'm not doing am impression. I'm stealing someone's work and likeness for commercial purposes.
Are you sad that your garbage generator is just a plagiarism machine?
Actually cutting it up into another video makes it transformative and it's protected under the DMCA. Thank you for proving you don't know what you're talking about. Take care.
Sure mate. You try selling a copy of it.
Likewise. You're either too dumb or stubborn to even google what "transformative work" is.
Typical "AI" techbro.
It's possible to get away with quite a lot under transformative use even when it's commercial, consider Cariou v. Prince for example: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/landmark-copyright-lawsuit-cariou-v-prince-is-settled-59702/
That is transformative work. Remixes are tranaformative work. Impersonations are transformative work.
Using a source and shuffling it around, then repackaging it as "from the same source" is not transformative work. It's copyright infringement.
I think it'd be entirely plausible to argue that, while transformative, current generative AI usage often falls short on the other fair use factors.
I don't really see how it can be argued that the linked example - relatively minor edits to a photograph - are more transformative than generative AI models. What is your criteria here?
Take a Nike shoe. Draw a large dick on the shoe. Try selling it as a Nike Shoe.
Vs.
Take a Nike Shoe. Draw a large dick on the shoe. Sell it as a piece of art. (As commentary on capitalism, etc)
Do you feel that one is copyright infringement and the other is a piece of transformative work?
Neither example is copyright infringement. The first-sale doctrine allows secondary markets - you are fine by copyright to sell your bedicked shoes to someone.
You're not just reselling, so the doctrine doesn't apply.
By selling the bedicked shoe as Nike you are implying that Nike has made this "offensive" shoe and are selling it.
If you do lie to the buyer that it was a brand new Nike shoe, it'd be the concern of the sales contract between you and the buyer, and trademark law.
I'll call it
"Brand new shoes by Nike"
And add a disclaimer
"This is not brand new shoes from Nike".
Do you think it will protect me from Nike?
Sold for 71 million. Which if that were people would be more than the UK.
Your comment reads like ChatGPT generated garbage.
You must be a hit at parties.
Is that what you do in parties? Interrupt people's discussions with completely unrelated nonsense?
I really want to drill this home, search YTP (YouTube Poop) on YouTube. The volume of evidence against your claim is enormous.
"evidence"
Take a Taylor Swift song. Sing on top of it. Try selling it with the name "Taylor Swift - I'm Not Dead"
You can sell it as "My garbage cover remix of Taylor Swift's song", but you cannot make an impression that this originated from Taylor Swift.
Same thing with Carlin, Beyonce, etc.
It is using the name and identical appearance of Carlin, to appear as if Carlin was speaking himself. A person who cannot read would not be able to differentiate. It is plagiarism and malicious copyright infringement.
I see so the law now depends on the illiterate and not the reasonable person standard?
We've shifted the goalpost from splicing together her entire discography to singing on top of a song. Neither of which is what AI does, or what that channel did with Carlin's work.
A person who can't read or hear. If you can't understand the narrator telling you for nearly a full minute that this is not George Carlin's work then you can't understand the next hour of the video that uses his voice anyways.
I'm trying to dumb down the problem so we can have a conversation. I am not saying it is what "AI" is doing.
I've said this elsewhere, a sticky note with a "no cppyroght infringement intended lol" is absolutely worthless.
Then I point you to the mountains of monetized, copyrighted and most importantly transformative YTP videos... and all of the sudden your new example is
Which is a copyright violation, and still not how the Carlin vid was made. But yeah...not shifting goalposts.
Making your examples more irrelevant and "dumbed down" isn't going to convince anyone. But maybe you're not even trying to convince anyone. If you want to make a convincing argument, tone down the vitriol and seething, and just talk about how this vid was actually made and how this actually constitutes a copyright violation.
YTP is satire. It is transformative. Christ, I'm not going to repeat myself over and over. If you don't comprehend, you don't comprehend. IDGAF.
The fact is, the original video is taken private. So there's the concousion. Bye.
You started at "all these things that aren't analogous or comparable to AI violate copyright" and never strayed from that 🤔 but ok bud
This thread didn't need any more AI hysteria, but it's your prerogative to tap out before talking about how AI actually works or how the Carlin vid was actually made
You're understimating what generative AI can do. I was shocked when I realized that GPT-3 was able to do creative writing, something that we thought would be out of reach after things like doing management and self driving cars. Turns out, creativity is what AI can actually do. Watch the video. This is like George Carlin but not using any of his material, instead creating something completely new in the style of George Carlin. They could have used the style and a slightly different voice, but they wanted to make a point here.
If your argument is that minds, be they artificial or human, are not allowed to learn from other peoples works then... well then that is a very immoral argument to make imho.
If you think that LLM has a "mind", there's no discussion with you, sorry.
That's not what I'm saying, What we currently have is more like the disembodied creative writing center of a brain, without memory or conscience but able to do creative writing. But it seems pretty clear now that we will have sentient artificial minds sooner than later.
And the last thing we need is to use intellectual "property" arguments to regulate this.
Me: hey chatgpt how many words were in your last response to me
Chatgpt: there were 79
Me: what is the approximate limit on your contextual window?
Chatgpt: The approximate limit on my contextual window is around 2048 tokens, which usually translates to around 1500 words, depending on the complexity and length of the words used. This limit affects how much text I can consider from previous interactions in a single conversation.
Define mind or at least list off criteria.
Wait did Beyoncé die?
Edit: no.
She still alive? Damn.
That title had me having to check though.
Again, video editing, plagiarism, and garbage generation have all always been possible. All AI did was make it easier.
That’s like being mad at matches because now anybody can make a fire, and by George, one of those fires could burn down an orphanage. But just forget about all the good things that fire can do like cook food or provide heat or forge steel or whatever else you use your fire for idk I’m not here to judge or kink shame you.
If the skills required are the justification for making AI bad, that’s cool. Let me just take away your GPS apps until you become a pro at operating a sextant.
No disagreement here. I'm using GPT for basic programming help.
Better tools, faster, skill bla bla bla. I couldn't give two shits about the contemporary garbage created. It's jut not interesting to me. It's like listening to someone about a dream they had.
"AI" isn't bad, it's the garbage that's being pushed as revolutionary. Nothing has changed. If you can't write a good poem, even if AI writes it for you, you still can't write a good poem. And that is what matters to me.
Any image generated by the garbage collecting machine using my input will never be better than my scribble on a piece of paper. Because it's just not "my".
That’s a much bigger discussion around licensing.
AIs are nothing without that the precious input that it learns from. That input comes from tons of different licenses and tons of different creators from tons of different countries and tons of different laws. You ironically need an AI lawyer to even start to sort it all out.
Thats kind of a significant issue, especially if you create something that years later, the AI later regurgitates a significant portion or obvious recreation of.
On your last point, for me, the output of an AI is the combination of its prompt, the inputs it has available to it (or at least the curation of said inputs), and the underlying code that combines it. If an individual or team of people create unique and novel art while being responsible for all three, I would say that deserves proper attribution and compensation where appropriate.
But for any schmuck just typing “alien with purpel boobs” in DALL-E is not an artist. I don’t care how many adjectives he uses to describe the nipples, or even if he fidgets with the lighting to accentuate the curls in her mane. I’m not even going to question why an alien species is assumed to be mammalian, even though that’s just patently absurd right off the bat. Like, seriously, the number if evolutionary dice rolls to get from self-replicating protein to a species that generates milk to feed its young is insane. The chances of that happening in two completely different environments is insane^2. None of that matters to me, because that person has nowhere near enough skin in the game to be considered a creator.
Theft means to deprive someone of their property. How is editing a video of Beyonce doing that? The owners of the videos still have it.
If you think this is what AI is doing I recommend looking more into how generative AI actually works. Even if that was what it did, as long as the ones publishing the work are not claiming or leading people to believe that this is Beyonce's work, then who cares? Should the entire genre of YouTube Poops be paying royalties to all the commercials and politicians they sample and splice?
No, this is not (and never was) how copyright works, nor how it should work.
If you take a second to read the article, you'll knotice that the title of the supposed standup is literally "George Carlin".
The video spends nearly a full minute telling you that the channel is dedicated solely to AI content, and that this is not the work of George Carlin. It fills the entire screen with "THIS IS NOT GEORGE CARLIN" several times as the words are spoken by the narrator.
As valid as uploading a copyrighted song to Youtube and saying "No copyright infringement intended" in the description.
The title is "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead (2024)" and it talks about his own death. Even if someone believes in communication beyond the grave to the extent that they could still mistake it as really being George Carlin, it's immediately explained as AI in the opening segment of the video.
It really was good material and I liked the alluding that AI was as close to heaven as you can get. Too bad it has been taken down. Locking our culture up is a disservice to everyone who has ever existed.
A sticky note is not a legal disclaimer, nor it has any legal value. It's like writing a "disclaimer" about privacy on your facebook wall. There are many works that talk about death, resurrection, being undead, etc. Carlin being dead has nothing to do with the title being an obvious infringement.
Have you watched the video? It's a thousand times more obvious than any legal disclaimer I've ever seen. They are not in any way hiding the fact that it is using AI.
Talking about death in the abstract is entirely possible while you're still alive. Creating material ~two decades after your own death about your death and events that happened since then, less so.
Copyright doesn't protect names or titles.
The Beatles have just officially released a song with their dead singer's voice.
No? Go to Spotify and try uploading a track as Michael Jackson, see if copyright "doesn't protect names or titles."
Lennon's vocals were recorded before his death, and thus aren't about his own death and events occurring after it.
To quote the US Copyright office:
I don't think Spotify allows individuals, as opposed to music distributors, to upload tracks at all - but more importantly their policies on impersonation are not what defines copyright.
Do you honestly think that context will matter legally, whether the dead "person" is talking/singing about love or their own death? This is nit-picking.
When I say copyright, I mean in a general sence. Infringement of IP might be a better suited phrase, but I assumed the synonymity was implied.
Yes, there is legal relevance to whether a reasonable person would interpret the remarks as really being from George Carlin, thus painting him in a false light, and the whole concept of George Carlin riffing on events occurring after his death (plus the disclaimer preceding the video and in the description) is relevant to determining that.
I don't see how this tracks. Consider your following comment:
Surely that's a reference to the character factor of fair use, a defense specifically against copyright infringement? It's not a term used in trademark law as far as I'm aware for example (and "George Carlin" is not a registered trademark anyway).
Were you just referring to, and telling them to google, the broad layperson definition of "transformative"? In which case I think you've misunderstood their comment, because I'm pretty sure at the very least they were referring to the fair use factor.
Exactly my point that it is not clear, since it's exactly Carlin's likeness. A person who tunes in at a random moment has no idea that this is what it it stated in the beginning and could 100% assume it's Carlin.
Techbros use "transformative work" as a catch-all for 'I moved a pixel; it's transformative!'. Making a standup comedy show from a person doing standup comedy show is using their exact likeness as a basis is not transformative work. You can also google and copy paste the requirements for work to be considered transformative.
You're now conflating multiple discussion tracks to various comparisons, rough equivalences amd simplifications. I'm sure quoting random shit from our convo will make your point across.
I'm done, I feel like your not discussing this in good faith and just border-line sealioning.
It is incredibly clear. The fact that it would take a person to pause the video before the first three seconds, skip to a random point, ignore that the topic of the standup is events that occurred since his death and being an AI, fail to read the written notices on-screen and in the description, etc. is evidence of this.
I think you're still getting wires crossed between different domains of IP law in a way that makes your objection meaningless. Transformative nature comes in as a part of a fair use defense specifically to copyright infringement - whereas elements of a person's likeness, like their face or voice, are not protected by copyright.