A war with artificial intelligence could be looming, but unlike in “The Terminator,” this resistance looks to be spearheaded by a late comedian and the world’s most popular pop star.
Both pop star Taylor Swift and the estate of the late comedian George Carlin have voiced strong displeasure with the way AI has been utilized with regard to their images and likenesses.
As Variety reports, Carlin’s estate is taking imminent action.
Carlin’s estate filed a lawsuit against media company Dudesy after it produced an hour-long comedy “special” that had AI recreate Carlin’s voice and style of comedy.
The lawsuit is seeking unspecified damages and the removal of the special, which features an obviously fake Carlin (he passed away in 2008).
In reality, the fake AI Carlin was a chatbot that had been fed the comedy legend’s routines and used it to mimic his voice and likeness.
The lawsuit claims that Dudesy fed this chatbot Carlin’s material without seeking permission or licensing rights.
The fake stand-up routine swiftly went viral, but the lawsuit slammed it as “a casual theft of a great American artist’s work.”
“My father was a legendary comedian and a once-in-a-lifetime talent whose legacy is the body of work that he left behind — his actual performances, albums and books,” Carlin’s daughter, Kelly, said in a statement. “I understand and share the desire for more George Carlin. I, too, want more time with my father. But it is ridiculous to proclaim he has been ‘resurrected’ with AI.
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“The ‘George Carlin’ in that video is not the beautiful human who defined his generation and raised me with love.
“It is a poorly-executed facsimile cobbled together by unscrupulous individuals to capitalize on the extraordinary goodwill my father established with his adoring fanbase.”
This landmark case will attract tons of eyeballs, if only for the novelty of the issue, but one person who may be particularly interested in what happens here? Taylor Swift.
And that’s because Swift is reportedly incensed with sexually explicit AI-generated social media images of her that swiftly went viral on social media.
(For obvious reasons, we won’t link to any of them here, but rest assured, this writer has viewed a couple and they are graphic).
According to The New York Times, one of the explicit images was viewed 47 million times on X before that particular X account was suspended.
While Swift herself has not publicly acknowledged these images, Swift’s biggest fans — “Swifties” — promptly flooded social media with hashtags of “PROTECT TAYLOR SWIFT” once the images began circulating.
Swift, already grappling with another serious issue, may not have to say anything given that others, including a pair of Democratic representatives, are speaking up on her behalf with regards to “deepfakes,” or doctored/fake images.
What’s happened to Taylor Swift is nothing new. For yrs, women have been targets of deepfakes w/o their consent. And w/ advancements in AI, creating deepfakes is easier & cheaper.
This is an issue both sides of the aisle & even Swifties should be able to come together to solve.
— Yvette D. Clarke (@RepYvetteClarke) January 25, 2024
The explicit AI images of Taylor Swift have people wondering: how is this not illegal?
I was astounded, too—so I wrote legislation to make non-consensual deepfakes a federal crime. Join me in advocating for passage of my bill, the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act.
— Joe Morelle (@RepJoeMorelle) January 26, 2024
“It’s always been a dark undercurrent of the internet, nonconsensual pornography of various sorts,” Oren Etzioni, a computer science professor at the University of Washington who works on deepfake detection, told The Times. “Now it’s a new strain of it that’s particularly noxious.”
Etzioni somberly added that no matter what happens, the viral nature of the explicit Swift images is already a win for the distributors.
“We are going to see a tsunami of these A.I.-generated explicit images. The people who generated this see this as a success,” Etzioni said.
