George Carlin’s family has reached a settlement in their lawsuit against the creators of an unauthorized comedy special they initially claimed, falsely, had been created by artificial intelligence.
In paperwork filed Tuesday in the US District Court for the Central District of California, attorneys for the Carlin family and for the podcast “Dudesy,” which produced the unauthorized special, confirmed that a settlement had been reached.
Among other things, Dudesy has “taken reasonable steps to remove all known mention of George Carlin and the Dudesy Special from the Dudesy Podcast and Dudesy’s social media accounts, including Instagram, Facebook and TikTok,” the filing said. As such, both sides have agreed to a permanent injunction against the special, to be enforced by the court.
No further details about the settlement — including whether the defendants have agreed to pay any monetary damages — have been made public.
The special, “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead,” was released in early January to outsized publicity thanks to false claims by Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen, hosts of the “Dudesy” podcast, that it had been written by an “AI,” also called Dudsey.
The special is an hour-long attempt to replicate the comedian’s style of comedy, but was widely panned not only for the poor quality of the digital recreation of Carlin’s voice but also for the quality of the jokes themselves. In addition, due to the obvious limitations in all other forms of so-called AI, there was widespread speculation that Sasso and Kultgen were lying about having used any for the special.
And so it is that once Carlin’s family filed their lawsuit, they admitted that Kultgen, and not any form of “AI,” wrote the whole thing.
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