this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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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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[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Eh…. I don’t know that I can agree with this.

I understand the intent behind it, but this specific instance is legitimately in parallel with impersonators, or satire. Hear me out.

They are impersonating his voice, using new content in his style, and make no claim to be legitimate.

So this comes down to “this is in bad taste” which, while I can understand and might even agree with… isn’t illegal.

The only novel concept in this, is that “scary tech” was used. There was no fraud, there was no IP violation, and no defamation. Where is the legal standing?

[–] Maggoty 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They trained the AI on his material. That's theft of IP without a license or agreement.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

So any human comedian listening and learning from other comedians is also STEALING the intellectual PROPERTY of them? That is very incendiary language btw.

Morally this imho comes down to a workers right issue. So there are legitimate reasons to argue that AI should not take our jobs. A kind of socialist market protection act.

But to use intellectual property in this case is just asking to make anything "Disney like" to be treated as copyright by Disney.

PS: BTW actually listen to the video https://youtu.be/2kONMe7YnO8 it is eerily good.

[–] Maggoty 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Presumably they paid to see the show each time they wanted to go learn from him. Also, it's extremely poor form to copy jokes. Learning the art of telling jokes like using callbacks wouldn't require watching solely one comedian either.

No matter how much they say this isn't Carlin, the entire selling premise here is that it's Carlin.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

The AI didn't copy jokes, it learned how to generate jokes just like Carlin. The point of this impersonation for me is to be able to actually compare it to Carin, as a benchmark.

It seems also clear that while this is mediocre at best, the next versions of AI will become as good as, and then better than Carlin. And then better than any human comedian could ever be. Might take a while but no doubt in my mind we'll get there sooner than later. So then they'll use artificial persona that become brands and are fully owned by corporation.

And they'll not just be insanely funny, they'll also become incredibly good at propaganda and reprogramming human minds to their master's agenda. Now a human entertainer at least has to have some humanity.

My point is that IP law is the WORST thing you can use to try to limit AIs. The hurt feelings or lost moneys of Carlin's heirs or other corporations are so utterly irrelevant in regards to the repercussions of this issue.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Machines aren't people. Machines don't learn. Machines copy data, manipulate and replicate it. That is copyright infringement. The laws for Machine duplication don't apply to human learning.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Machines don’t learn.

It's called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning

That they actually learned to do creative writing is the shocking thing. Mediocre so far, but they will improve. And denial won't help.

[–] wikibot 1 points 11 months ago

Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalize to unseen data, and thus perform tasks without explicit instructions. Recently, generative artificial neural networks have been able to surpass many previous approaches in performance. Machine learning approaches have been applied to many fields including large language models, computer vision, speech recognition, email filtering, agriculture, and medicine, where it is too costly to develop algorithms to perform the needed tasks. ML is known in its application across business problems under the name predictive analytics. Although not all machine learning is statistically based, computational statistics is an important source of the field's methods.

^to^ ^opt^ ^out^^,^ ^pm^ ^me^ ^'optout'.^ ^article^ ^|^ ^about^

[–] Doomsider -3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I teared up listening to this special. It was like he was still alive. A lot of good material and definitely in his spirit. People who want to lock up our culture behind paywalls can get bent.

[–] afraid_of_zombies 2 points 11 months ago

No don't you understand. If we don't enforce copyright laws we won't get a 19th Fast and the Furious movie.