Following lawsuit, rep admits "AI" George Carlin was human-written

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/george-carlins-heirs-sue-comedy-podcast-over-ai-generated-impression/

by rntn • 2 years ago

73 28 2 years ago

jpalawaga• 2 years ago

The "no, actually, a human did it" is an interesting defense. How are you to prove one way or another short of finding system logs of an AI outputting the material?

Further, does copyright law really care what generate the material? Either the material is copyrighted or it isn't, and people aren't signing licenses about reproducing what they hear/interpret/etc (which, imo, would be a flagrant misapplication of copyright law).

That being said, I haven't researched how likeness laws extend beyond the person's life.

PeterisP2• 2 years ago

Copyright law cares about what generated the material, because it protects certain rights of the creator of the work, and if you can't point to a human creator whose rights were violated (a machine or program has no legal rights) then no one has any exclusive rights to that work, it's outside the scope of copyright law, it's effectively "uncopyrightable". These rights can be transferred from the author to a corporation, for example, in employment contract or law; but a corporation can't simply claim them if they never existed in the first place.

ertian• 2 years ago

This is kind of an interesting twist on a Turing test. If you can't tell by examining the work whether it was created by a human or an AI, then how can we say that a human is creative an an AI is not?

cmcaleer• 2 years ago

As it relates to computers though this seems incredibly messy and a bad interpretation. Is my python script copyrighted, but the bytecode (generated by a computer) not? How do compiled programs have any copyright protection? Am I only violating a computer's copyright (so no copyright) if I crack DRM on a generated executable file[1]? Does the DMCA anti-circumvention protection only apply to hand-applied protection? When is a computer doing too much of the work? What about a Blender render? I think it would take me a hot minute to do those raytracing computations by hand. Do I only get the copyright to the output if I do that?

The most straightforward way to look at it is that computers and their programs are a tool, and their output as used by a person or person on behalf of a company. I think this current definition as I (NAL) understand it is unworkable and probably won't last long-term.

[1] Say for the sake of argument that there's no images or models or things that are obviously copyrighted, it's just a CLI calculator

kmeisthax3• 2 years ago

This argument is backwards. George Carlin is a human, and he's the one whose rights were presumably violated. It's the creator of the fake George Carlin stand-up special's job to prove their behavior was legal.

Saying that the AI George Carlin was human-written only means that, if creating your own George Carlin special is fair-use for some reason, then the human gets to claim copyright over that special. If it's AI then there's no copyright - at least, over the parts created by AI.

Just to make things even more confusing, this also has nothing to do with the copyright on the training set data. If the AI you used had a 100% licensed training set, you still have to worry about how the AI's legally uncreative[0] contribution to the work dilutes your ownership of it.

[0] As in, whether or not AI is creative, as a matter of law, it's not creative.

latency-guy2• 2 years ago

How are you to prove one way or another short of finding system logs of an AI outputting the material?

I imagine the defense is the same as any other defense of "no, it was not me, it was someone other than me", you must establish your presence or activity at the time, or if they're the defendant, establish enough doubt to the prosecution's position.

Not a lawyer at all though.

dotancohen• 2 years ago

But saying "the tool did it" is ridiculous. AI is still a tool, not a separate responsible entity.

"I did not shoot the sheriff, Your Honour. The Colt did it."

Lerc• 2 years ago

In this case I don't think it is terribly pertinent whether or not the content was AI generated. The issue here is someone is trying to capitalize on the legacy of George Carlin. Admitting that it is human-written does not change that aspect.

I'm not an expert in the entire IP landscape, but I suspect this might not be a copyright issue at all. The problem is the brand (how George would hate that phrasing) is being appropriated. If you paid an artist to draw a picture of Keanu eating donuts for an advertising campaign there would be the same issue.

If anything this ends up being a partial defense of AI, given that the issues raised are neither specific to AI nor require additional laws to seek redress. It is hard to determine how much of the article text

That training would, by definition, involve making "unauthorized copies" of "Carlin's original, copyrighted routines"

...is a quote from the lawsuit. It is certainly not clear in a moral or legal sense whether training constitutes making an unauthorized copy. That is the big issue to be decided. Having an opinion and declaring it does not make it true. People are doing that on both sides already.

It should be noted that in addition to the legal issues, comedians have their own culture which is separate from the legal definitions of acceptable behaviour. The tolerance for reusing ideas is considerably lower within that community. Many things that are perfectly legal might render you a pariah to that community.

notfed2• 2 years ago

The issue here is someone is trying to capitalize on the legacy of George Carlin.

Personally, if someone creates an entertaining video that successfully captures the spirit of George Carlin, or any deceased speaker or artist, that sounds awesome. I'm all for it. I'd also love to have another Led Zeppelin album.

How would you suggest someone creates this ethically?

quatrefoil• 2 years ago

That was the whole gimmick here, though. They pitched it as "AI-generated George Carlin". They used his likeness for the thumbnail. They faked his voice.

Nothing is stopping you from writing a novel in the style of Harry Potter, but if you put "Harry Potter" in the title and use the same typeface, you're probably gonna get a call from a lawyer, because you're clearly trying to capitalize on existing IP instead of letting your work stand on its own merits. Is that wrong?

There's plenty of people bashing the concept of intellectual property here because Disney or whatever, but most artists aren't fat cats, and copyright protects their livelihoods without forcing them to rely on state sponsorship or private patronage - both of which are pretty problematic for artistic expression.

rchaud• 2 years ago

How would you suggest someone creates this ethically?

Step 1: Ask for permission.

Example: the hologram of 2pac at Coachella 2012. It was pitched to the rapper's estate, they reviewed the proposal and approved.

potatolicious• 2 years ago

"It is certainly not clear in a moral or legal sense whether training constitutes making an unauthorized copy."

Another complicating factor here is to what extent the mainstream definition of "training" even applies to things like LLMs.

The mismatch between what "training" typically means vs. what it means very specifically in a ML context is the source of many problems in this discussion.

We have for example heard many arguments that a human listening to every Beatles album, and then writing a new song based heavily in the style of the Beatles, is very clearly legal. But it's not clear that the ML model "learns" or "trains" in any way that is analogous to the human mind.

Another problem that I think we're not really contending with is to what extent LLMs generalize and to what extent they memorize. The more memorization that occurs the more compelling the argument will be that this is to some extent copyright-violating.

It certainly doesn't help the generalization argument that many LLMs can be compelled fairly easily to reproduce parts of their training data verbatim.

resoluteteeth• 2 years ago

In this case I don't think it is terribly pertinent whether or not the content was AI generated. The issue here is someone is trying to capitalize on the legacy of George Carlin. Admitting that it is human-written does not change that aspect.
It is hard to determine how much of the article text ...is a quote from the lawsuit. It is certainly not clear in a moral or legal sense whether training constitutes making an unauthorized copy. That is the big issue to be decided. Having an opinion and declaring it does not make it true. People are doing that on both sides already.

The article is paraphrasing one of the three claims asserted in the complaint filed by George Carlin's estate (https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/24377438-govuscour...):

Without authorization from Plaintiffs, or any right under law, Defendants have unlawfully used Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works for building and training a dataset for purposes of generating an output intended to mimic Plaintiffs’ copyrighted work (i.e., Carlin’s stand-up comedy).

So regardless of whether the court will agree with this (I don't think the details of how training of AI models works in relation to copyright law have been settled in case law yet), it is in fact highly pertinent to the lawsuit because there will be no copyright claim if an AI was not trained on Carlin's work.

That would still leave the two other claims though (violation of rights of publicity and deprivation of rights of publicity).

askonomm• 2 years ago

I saw that video on YouTube, and I thought it was also written in the description of the video that it was human written, and even human voiced, but then made sound like Carlin with AI.

unsane• 2 years ago

Yeah, at the time it was pretty widely known that this was the case (I don't recall whether it was in the description specifically). There's no revelation or admission that suddenly occurred this week.

JieJie• 2 years ago

I guess I figured it was written by Kultgen with the help from ChatGPT? It would have been a noteworthy feat for a built-from-scratch-by-training-on-MADtv-episodes foundation model was capable of generating the Carlin video at the click of a button. That’s still obvious to the average person, isn’t it? Maybe not? (And is that officially the world we live in now?)

Anyhoo. Still fair use, and even more so. A joke doesn’t have to rise to a certain level of hilarity to deserve 1st A. protection.

Even when, especially when, the joke is on us.^0

0: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/04/1126773469/onion-supreme-cour...

drewcoo• 2 years ago

Great. Can we all just Mencia this Chad Kultgen dude and be done with it?

WrockBro• 2 years ago

Anticipating potential free speech defenses, the lawsuit argues that the special "has no comedic or creative value absent its self-proclaimed connection with George Carlin” and that it doesn't “satirize him as a performer or offer an independent critique of society.”

How is commenting on current events not "an independent critique of society"?

labrador• 2 years ago

George Carlin always credited his older brother Patrick for being the genius of the family, so if I were them I would have presented "George Carlin's Genius Brother For the First Time!" or something like that, but of course that would be wrong and disrespectful as well. Maybe more legally defensible.

https://variety.com/2022/film/news/patrick-carlin-dead-90-ge...

Following lawsuit, rep admits "AI" George Carlin was human-written

Related Stories