A new comedy special starts with the quote, “I’m sorry it took me so long to come out with new material, but I do have a pretty good excuse. I was dead.”
The voice sounds like comedian George Carlin, but that would be impossible, as Carlin died in 2008. The voice in the special is actually generated by an artificial intelligence (AI).
“This is not my father. It’s so ghoulish. It’s so creepy,” Carlin’s daughter, Kelly Carlin-McCall, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
The YouTube account Dudesy, which is described as a podcast, artificial intelligence and “first of its kind media experiment,” released the hour-long special on Jan. 9. CBC reached out to the producers of Dudesy and its co-host Will Sasso for comment, but did not get a response.
Sasso and co-host Chad Kultgen say they can’t reveal the company behind the AI due to a non-disclosure agreement, according to Vice. The channel launched in March 2022.
Carlin-McCall said the channel never reached out to the family or asked for permission to use her father’s likeness. She says her father took great pride in the thought and effort he put into writing his material.
I’m sorry if I come across like a pedantic ass (e; and I’m sorry I got a little tilted with my last comment), but I think this is a really important distinction and each of these things needs separate rules to build the kind of society we want to live in.
It was labor when it was written and performed, and that labor should be respected and fairly compensated, but once we cross the threshold from writing and performance to recordings of those performances and copies of writings we’re talking about intellectual property. I don’t think you should be able to make commercial use of other people’s intellectual property without their permission, but I think that’s a civil lawsuit type of problem not a crime (whereas stealing someone’s labor, whether through wage theft or through actual chattel slavery, should be considered a crime, imo). If we don’t keep those distinctions clear, corps like Disney and EA are going to use protections we have (or should have) for people’s labor to attack anyone they can claim are messing with their brands.
I’ve got a lot of respect for Carlin and think this project was a bad idea in bad taste and the wishes of his family members ought to be respected, but I don’t want to see an emotional outrage tip us into making dumb laws.
see, now you’re arguing opinion, not fact, and while you’re welcome to your opinion regarding what is and is not “labor”-- i disagree. a bunch of mental gymnastics and moral equivocation while further splitting hairs does not a convincing argument make.
the product of labor is still labor.