George Carlin’s daughter and keeper of his estate, Kelly Carlin, isn’t laughing about a new AI-generated “special” of supposedly new material by her late father titled I’m Glad I’m Dead. As she posted Wednesday night on X: “ZERO PERMISSION GRANTED.”
Today she told The Daily Beast, “We’re having conversations with lawyers right now, so we’ll see what happens with that for us.”
Kelly Carlin has had to deal with strangers misattributing quotes to her father or misappropriating his work since the legendary comedian died in 2008, from fake quotes in memes to rumors of holograms and now AI-generated material in his name.
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“Even when my dad was alive, on the front page of his website was this big announcement” disavowing any connection to the widely circulated essay “The Paradox Of Our Time,” as also debunked by Snopes. “My dad had it on the front page of his website. This is not me. This is not what I would ever say,” she said. “He poo-pooed it. So yes, he even dealt with it at the early stages of the internet.”
A ChatGPT prompt that went viral last March wondering what George Carlin would say about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank made Kelly Carlin groan, “Just fucking shoot me.”
Dudesy’s George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead, released to YouTube on Tuesday, has generated more than 161,000 views, more than tripling its view count in the past 24 hours. Although the video starts with a disclaimer that “what you’re about to hear is not George Carlin,” claiming it’s merely an impersonation “like Will Ferrell impersonating George W. Bush,” Kelly Carlin begs to differ.
She is used to trying to chase down every false meme. “But this is different. This is just a whole other can of worms,” she tells us. “I mean, ultimately, there is enough real George Carlin in the world that this little thing is not going to make a difference, but this is the tip of the spear. This is the barn door, you know, how many metaphors can I use for this? We must take a stand as artists, and those who take care of the legacies of artists.”
Worries about producers using AI to resurrect dead actors and celebrities for future projects was a main sticking point in strike negotiations last year for both the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild. Josh Gondelman, a stand-up comedian and former late-night TV writer who served as a 2023 WGA strike captain, tells The Daily Beast that this AI comedy special proves their concerns were legitimate.
“There’s the idea of someone’s image being used in perpetuity, including after their death, without consent or appropriate compensation,” Gondelman said. “And the subtler worry here is using material generated artists to train A.I. which is still an ongoing legal issue. You can’t really say ‘Write an hour of George Carlin material!’ to a bot that has never ingested/analyzed George Carlin’s previous material, which is a different legal/ethical grey area.”
Kelly Carlin, meanwhile, had plans to meet with the WGA/SAG representatives later on Thursday who are lobbying Congress around these issues. “I’m very interested in what is happening legally on this front,” she says. “So yes, it is very much in alignment with both SAG and the Writer’s Guild really wanted to fight for, but the Screen Actors Guild is really helping people who are dead protect their name and likeness in a very unique way.”
Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen, the duo behind the Dudesy platform that created the new hour, have preferred to let their podcast speak for them.
They act as if they’re just two funny dudes at the mercy of an artificial intelligence they’ve collaborated with that somehow decided—nine months after receiving a cease-and-desist order from Tom Brady’s lawyers to take down their supposedly AI-generated comedy routine from the NFL great—that it’d be a bright idea to regurgitate the recorded material of the late George Carlin to spit out a “new” hour of comedy Tuesday based on current events.
They act as if their AI collaboration came up with the Carlin stunt all on its own, listening to the announcement with shocked looks on their faces. Sasso, a former cast member of MADtv and Loudermilk (the latter recently added to Netflix and enjoying a viewing resurgence) who also played Curly in the 2012 Three Stooges film, is seen rubbing his hand across his face, wondering what’s even happening. After they watch the clip above where faux Carlin mocks the threat AI poses to take away jobs from stand-up comedians, Sasso claims, “I loved George Carlin. George Carlin’s one of my all-time absolute favorite stand-up comedians.”
“Same,” said Kultgen, whose biggest Hollywood credit is co-writing the story for the 2013 box-office bomb starring Steve Carell and Jim Carrey as feuding magicians, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. “My mind is blown by this.”
Sasso adds, “Yeah, me too. I’m sort of at a loss.”
That didn’t stop them from telling listeners and viewers several times to look up the special. Sasso seemed to downplay the impact the fake Carlin special would have on the future of comedy, although he said he wouldn’t want to see AI formulate new songs based on dead musicians. “I personally don’t want to hear a Nirvana song that’s not written by Kurt Cobain and played by fucking Nirvana,” Sasso has said.
Kultgen, for his part, predicted AI soon would become influential enough to produce a real-life counterpart to the fictional 1980s TV star/spokesman Max Headroom. Sasso compared the eventual acceptance of AI-based entertainment to the evolution of lab-processed meat as a substitute for the real thing.
The very next segment of their Dudesy episode then broadcast an AI-illustrated and inspired movie trailer for a fake movie, House Katz, starring “Toam Hain” as a man stuck taking care of a house full of cats. Hain, of course, looked and sounded a lot like Tom Hanks, with the misspellings of his name a popularly-mocked feature/bug of AI-prompted art.
George Carlin performs in Chicago, Illinois, February 3, 1982
Paul Natkin / GettyThe fake George Carlin special, on the other hand, doesn’t ever show us a true Carlin, and doesn’t sound much like him either.
“They’re so opaque about this stuff. Some people are saying Will and his partner… are writing some of this material. And they claim that they just hand all of their life over to the AI and it generates it,” Kelly Carlin said, adding that the company has no contact information other than Dudesy LLC. “So somebody is owning the copyright of something here.”
And yet the comedy special is complemented throughout with AI-prompted illustrations, some of which could not be intuited directly from the delivered monologue. For instance, when fake Carlin says the word “dads” during a bit about AI substitutes for sexual predators, the illustrated prompt displays Donald and Ivanka Trump.
The special also includes a bit where fake Carlin bemoans the fact that Anglo names haven’t changed all that much, and gives Elon Musk at least some creative credit for naming his son something like X Æ A-12. Except the real-life Carlin would know that there are plenty of non-Anglo Americans varying up the spelling of their kids’ names, and moreover would’ve steered clear of a premise that even when he was alive was the topic of heated comedy debate over whether Dane Cook had stolen it from Louis C.K., or whether they’d both stolen the premise from Steve Martin.
If anything, Carlin was more precise about his wording, delivery and cadence than perhaps any other comedian ever, which makes it near impossible for an impersonator—human or electronic—to duplicate.
And fake Carlin’s premise that other dead comedians would join him in rising up from their graves to deliver a 24/7/365 stream of live commentary is a weird boast when he was alive to see that already happen with Twitter.
But by far the most stunning thing about this stunt is the notion that we need to see or hear what George Carlin would have to say about life in 2024. For the past 16 years, we’ve been recirculating past comedy clips from his actual specials on social media with regularity offering precisely the commentary to fit just about any occasion.
The 2022 Emmy-winning two-part HBO documentary, George Carlin’s American Dream, directed by Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio (with Kelly Carlin alongside as an executive producer), even asked and answered this very question, closing with a montage of images depicting events since the comedian’s death in 2008, set to audio excerpts from his comedy to match the events in question.
Kelly Carlin understands the impulse deeply, naturally.
“Of course I would want to know what my dad thinks about life in these times. Oh my God! I would give anything to be a daughter and sit down and say, ‘Please! Help make sense of this world,’” she says, adding, “But the bottom line is, and this is why I put in the quote about humans are so afraid of the void that they can’t leave what’s already fallen into it there.”
But she points back to the fact that her father’s 14 specials are still out and available, whether on Max, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, or elsewhere. “If you want to know what he thought, then listen to his material,” she says
Because this younger, Southern-accented voice via Dudesy isn’t cutting it.
“This is what happens when people are so opaque about the product here, that people are just projecting whatever they think onto it,” she adds. “Either way, it does not sound like my dad. It is not my dad. It is not his material. It is not really his sort of likeness, his ponytail. It’s not his voice. It’s not even really his cadence. So therefore they need to take the name off because it is not George Carlin.”
Dudesy did take down their Brady comedy special last year after receiving that cease-and-desist letter, although you can still find the complete video on YouTube under a different account.
“Good to know that somehow, some way, I actually have something strangely in common with Tom Brady now,” Kelly Carlin jokes.
