The estate of comedian George Carlin settled a lawsuit on Tuesday against the owners of a comedy podcast who claimed they used artificial intelligence to mimic the deceased stand-up's voice. The lawsuit was one of the first in the US to focus on the legality of deepfakes imitating a celebrity's likeness. The Dudesy podcast and its creators – the former Mad TV comedian Will Sasso and the writer Chad Kultgen – agreed to remove all versions of the podcast from the internet and permanently refrain from using Carlin's voice, likeness or image in any content. Danielle Del, a spokesperson for Sasso, declined to comment. Carlin's family and an attorney for his estate both praised the settlement. Neither side disclosed terms of the deal.

There will be no follow-up to that AI-generated George Carlin comedy special released by the podcast Dudesy. Now, the two sides have reached a settlement agreement, which includes the permanent removal of the comedy special from Dudesy's archive. Sasso and Kultgen have also agreed never to repost it on any platform and never to use Carlin's image, voice or likeness without approval from the estate again, according to The New York Times. The AI algorithm that Dudesy used for the special was trained on thousands of hours of Carlin's routines that spanned decades of his career. It generated enough material for an hour-long special, but it did a pretty poor impression of the late comedian with basic punchlines and very little of what characterized Carlin's humor.