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If its wrong to use AI to put genitals in someone's mouth it should probably be wrong to use AI to put words in their mouth as well.
This case is not just about AI, it’s about the humans that use AI to violate the law, infringe on intellectual property rights and flout common decency.”
Well put.
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?
They trained the AI on his material. That's theft of IP without a license or agreement.
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.
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"That use AI to violate the law"
Watch out impressionists. If you get too good you might become a lawbreaker. The AI hysteria is beyond absurd.
That's not what this is about though.
AI should follow the standard norms and conventions we've established up to this point. Which, generally speaking, would prohibit using someone's likeness without their consent to make a profit, and also not using the likeness of a well loved, dead man, in such a trashy way.
You know, basic human decency.
"using someone's likeness"
Again, so someone can't do a gilbert gottfried impression while doing their own stand-up? That's illegal to do because their voice itself is copyright protected? Man, all these AI covers on Youtube are fucked then.
You completely misunderstand the law to appeal to emotion which continues to feed into the hysteria around generative AI. Photoshop isn't illegal, generative AI isn't illegal, doing impressions isn't illegal. This would be no different if someone took that same script and did their best George Carlin impression.
Building those isn't illegal. Using them to make a profit without consent is. The law is very clear here. This is what is at issue here.
Right so every single song, every use of Frank Sinatra's voice on YouTube to cover songs is wildly illegal, yes? They have ads, they're doing it for profit. The people who made the special didn't sell access to it so how'd they make money? Same way I'd imagine.
those the use ai for it, yes actually. in fact, if we're following the letter of copyright law, almost every meme is technically illegal.
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AI hysteria
This is the concise way of putting it that I've been missing.
Using AI to do something that actually intelligent beings already legally do, like impressions and parody (with disclaimers and all that), isn't suddenly theft or stealing because AI was used in the process. I'm really disappointed in the Lemmy community for buying into all this bs
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I'm torn. I can see why they would be upset. And they may have a case with likeness rights.
But at the same time, this specific example isn't trying to claim any kind of authenticity. It goes out of its way to explain that it's not George. It seems clearly to be along the lines of satire. No different than an impersonator in a SNL type sketch.
I guess I don't have any real problem with clearly fake AI versions of things. My only real problem would be with actual fraud. Like the AI Biden making calls trying to convince people not to vote in a primary. That's clearly criminal fraud, and an actual problem.
My only real problem would be with actual fraud. Like the AI Biden making calls trying to convince people not to vote in a primary.
That's the difference between impression and impersonation. My disappointment in the Lemmy community for not understanding the difference is immeasurable. We're supposed to be better than this but really we're no better than Reddit, running with ragebait headlines for the cheap dopamine hit that is the big upvote number.
If it were a human doing a Carlin impression, literally NOBODY would give a fuck about this video.
Ive been thinking about this a lot and if you think about this like they are selling a stolen product then it can be framed differently.
Say I take several MegaMan games, take a copy of all the assets, recombine them into a new MegaMan game called "Unreal Tales of MegaMan". The game has whole new levels inspired by capcom's Megaman. Many would argue that the work is transformative.
Am I allowed to sell that MegaMan game? I'm not a legal expert but I think the answer to that would generally be no. My intention here is to mimic a property and profit off of a brand I do not own the rights too.
Generative AI uses samples of original content to create the derivative work to synthesize voices of actors. The creator of this special intention is to make content from a brand that they can solely profit from.
If you used an AI to generate a voice like George Carlin to voice the Reptilian Pope in your videogame, I think you would have a different problem here. I think it's because they synthesized the voice and then called it George Carlin and sold it as a "New Comedy Special" it begins to fall into the category of Bootleg.
You couldn't sell that game, even if you created your own assets, because Mega Man is a trademarked character. You could make a game inspired by Mega Man, but if you use any characters or locations from Mega Man, you would be violating their trademark.
AI, celebrity likeness, and trademark is all new territory, and the courts are still sorting out how corporations are allowed to use a celebrities voices and faces without their consent. Last year, Tom Hanks sued a company that used an IA generated version of him for an ad, but I think it's still in court. How the courts rule on cases like this will probably determine how you can use AI generated voices like in your Reptilian Pope example (though in that case, I'd be more worried about a lawsuit from Futurama).
This lawsuit is a little different though; they're sidestepping the issue of likeness and claiming that AI is stealing from Carlin's works themselves, which are under copyright. It's more similar to the class action lawsuit against Chat GPT, where authors are suing because the chatbot was fed their works to create derivative works without their consent. That case also hasn't been resolved yet.
Edit: Sorry, I also realized I explained trademark and copyright very poorly. You can't make a Mega Man game because Mega Man, as a name, is trademarked. You could make a game that has nothing to do with the Mega Man franchise, but if you called it Mega Man you would violate the trademark. The contents of the game (levels, music, and characters) are under copyright. If you used the designs of any of those characters but changed the names, that would violate copyright.
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What's the alleged crime? Comedy impersonation isn't illegal. And the special had numerous disclaimers that it was an impersonation of Carlin.
Sounds like a money grab by the estate, which Carlin himself probably would have railed on.
Where's the line? Were they parodying Carlin? Or just using his likeness? Can Fox News do this with Biden?
This is a far larger thing than just a comedy impersonation.
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What do you mean by "comedy impersonation" - parody, or just copying a comedian?
If I were to set up a music show with a Madonna impersonator and slightly changed Madonna songs (or songs in her style), I'll get my pants sued off.
If Al Yankovic does a parody of a Madonna song, he's in the clear (He does ask for permission, but that's a courtesy and isn't legally mandatory).
The legal term is "transformative use". Parody, like where SNL has Alec Baldwin impersonating Trump, is a recognized type of transformative use. Baldwin doesn't straight up impersonate Trump, he does so in a comedic fashion (The impersonation itself is funny, regardless of how funny Trump is). The same logic applied when parodying or impersonating a comedian.
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‘A Casual Theft of a Great American Artist’s Work’
Except.... maybe not?
Dudesy started an "AI podcast" as in a podcast "generated by AI" back when GPT-3 was just coming out. Their first episode included an extensive discussion of kayfabe. In other words, an elaborate hoax, using more traditional voice-masking tools, to record a human-written (perhaps AI-assisted?), human-voice, speaking the lines and having Carlin's voice replace the original voice speaking.
Long article, but worth the read. Certainly seems like kayfabe to me.
It’s also worth remembering the context around AI at the time Dudesy premiered in March 2022. The “state of the art” public AI at the time was the text-davinci-002 version of GPT-3, an impressive-for-its-day model that nonetheless still utterly failed at many simple tasks. It wouldn’t be until months later that a model update gave GPT-3 now-basic capabilities like generating rhyming poetry.
When Dudesy launched, we were still about eight months away from the public launch of ChatGPT revolutionizing the public understanding of large language models. We were also still three months away from Google’s Blake Lemoine making headlines for his belief that Google’s private LaMDA AI model was “sentient.”
The strongest evidence that the Dudesy AI is just a bit, though, comes later in that first episode. It starts with a lengthy discussion of kayfabe, a popular professional wrestling term that Sasso extends to include any form of entertainment that is “essentially holding up the conceit that it is real… if you're watching a movie, the characters don't just turn to you and say, ‘Hi, my name is Tom Cruise’… he's an actor.”
Kultgen links the kayfabe concept to one of his favorite reality shows, saying, “For The Bachelor, most of that audience believes it's real. Almost none of the WWE audience believes it's actually real.”
That’s when Sasso all but gives up the game, as far as Dudesy is concerned. “Of course nobody believes [the WWE] is real,” he says. “It's not about it being real. It's sort of a... you know, they say it's like a burlesque for guys. And that's what Dudesy is, a burlesque for guys.”
When I first approached Willison with the question of whether a current AI could write the Dudesy-Carlin special, he said he’d “expect GPT-4 to be able to imitate [Carlin’s] style pretty effectively… due to the amount of training data out there.” Indeed, if you ask ChatGPT-4 for some Carlin-esque material, you’ll get a few decent short-form observations, though none of the vulgarity and little of the insight that characterizes a true Carlin bit.
After watching a bit more of the special, though, Willison said he grew skeptical that GPT-4 or any current AI model was up to the task of creating the kinds of jokes on offer here. “I've poked around with GPT-4 for jokes a bunch, and my experience is that it's useless at classic setup/punchline stuff,” he said.
Willison pointed specifically to a Dudesy-Carlin bit about the potential for an AI-generated Bill Cosby (“With AI Bill Cosby, you get all of the Cosby jokes with none of the Cosby rapes”). Willison said he’s “never managed to get GPT-4 (still the best available model) to produce jokes with that kind of structure… when I try to get jokes out of it, I get something with a passable punchline about one out of ten times.”
While Willison said that Dudesy’s Carlin-esque voice imitation was well within the capabilities of current technology, the idea that an AI wrote the special was implausible. “Either they have genuinely trained a custom model that can generate jokes better than any model produced by any other AI researcher in the world... or they're still doing the same bit they started back in 2022,” he said.
That's a really long article to basically say that the Carlin AI stand-up was probably mostly if not entirely written by a human--but to sound like an AI. It's an impression of AI by a lousy comic (or a couple of em working together) and they decided to shit on the legacy of one of our greatest comic minds in the process. If that's the joke, i can see why nobody is laughing.
There's obviously a lot of legal grey-areas here though, so if any good comes from this it will hopefully be in the form of laws to prevent stupid shit like this flooding the Internet.
And they deserve to lose the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds. Full stop.
Anyone that actually knows the story behind it from a context beyond the anti-AI circlejerking narratives knows it was a form of comedic parody put together by comedians.
First amendment's got nothing to do with this my man.
The very often misunderstood first amendment only protects citizen's speech from criminal charges by the government. Perhaps you meant the fair use doctrine?
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It's worth pointing out here that this script was probably written by a human.
Edit: reporting now indicates that it was human written https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/george-carlins-heirs-sue-comedy-podcast-over-ai-generated-impression/
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I'd have sympathy if this was about a grieving family wanting to be left alone, but it looks more like the "estate" wanting money. At least they aren't going after total nobodies. (Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen)
As long as it's presented honestly, I don't have a problem with this. It's really no different from:
Or:
Or:
A (at most) 20 second parodic imitation in a short cartoon is no different from a whole hour-long stand-up special automatically generated using a life's worth of actual stand-up material?
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I'll take Lawyers Maximizing Billable Hours for $500, Alex
I don't think individuals should own their tone of voice or style. I've seen the copyright abuse on YouTube and it would end up with videos being taken down the moment you utter a word with a tone of voice that sounds mildly like a celebrity.
I do believe they should own their name though. Getting sued because you try to pass yourself off as someone else is completely justifiable. This video is coasting off his name, it isn't exactly right.
It’s not trying to pass itself off as Carlin though. It clearly says at the beginning that it is NOT him, that it’s an AI’s impression of him.
This would open up any comedian who does an impression of anyone else to a lawsuit. The only difference is that this is AI doing it instead of a person.
I would agree with you if they hadn't named their video "George Carlin - I'm glad I'm dead". This is the equivalent of a Taylor Swift band putting out original work and naming their upload "Taylor Swift - my new song".
I shouldn't have to wonder if the video I'm clicking is by the original artist or an AI/Impersonator. It should be clear without a doubt.
There is a line and it's pretty generous but I think they crossed it, most likely purposely as to drum up controversy and make a quick buck. It's a shame because this kind of irresponsibility is only going to cause problems.
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But…impressions are covered because it’s obvious to most everyone that the person impersonating is not the original subject. It’s clearly another person making a point with a reasonable facsimile of the other person.
But when you start veering into taking someone’s likeness and making it say things the subject never chose to say…it’s entirely different. The point of the AI is to get as realistic as possible.
I don’t think giving a disclaimer even matters here. The law isn’t adapted to a time where this was even possible, so the law is obviously lacking now, but I’m sure depending on your jurisdiction, the law for not using likeness as in photos/videos/voice in commercials still applies. It’s only more egregious because you’re not pulling from words they’ve said, but literally putting words in the persons mouth. It’s just wrong.
Internet: this is awful, of course your inheritors own your own image as stewarts.
Also Internet: I have a right to take pictures of you, your car, your house, or record you without consent. Edit it however I want. Make as much money as I want from the activities and you have no rights. Since if technology allows me to do something you have no expectation that I won't.
We are demanding that a public figure who is dead have more rights than a private person who is alive.
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this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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