Tennessee became the primary U.S. state to guard musicians from AI that might clone and manipulate their voices, creating deepfakes, without permission.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security (ELVIS) Act into law on Thursday, adding the unauthorized use of an individual’s voice to Tennessee’s list of protected rights.
The ELVIS Act ensures that “nobody will steal the voices of Tennessee artists,” Lee stated at an event announcing the bill in January.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee. Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images
Deepfakes are synthetic media that replicate the voices, images or other features of an individual and use those features in recent contexts. With the rapid development of generative AI, deepfakes have proliferated, including a viral track featuring the deepfake vocals of Drake and The Weeknd.
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Artists like Selena Gomez and Cher have weighed in on the “scary” implications of deepfakes.
“I’m telling you, for those who work endlessly to change into anyone — and I’m not talking about anyone within the famous, money part — but an artist, after which someone just takes it from you, it looks as if it needs to be illegal,” Cher told the Associated Press.
Recently, Taylor Swift’s likeness and voice were used for a false promoting campaign for Le Creuset cookware.
Related: Taylor Swift Is the Latest Victim of an AI Deepfake as Meta Pulls False Commercial
The “speed, scale, believability” and “access” that non-technical Web users now possess to create highly realistic deepfakes have “all form of combined to create this witch’s brew,” Matthew Ferraro, an attorney at WilmerHale LLP who has been following deepfake laws, told Bloomberg.
“People often talk in regards to the slow, glacial pace of lawmaking, and that is an area where that actually is not the case,” Ferraro stated to the outlet.
Lawmakers in other states have taken steps to handle AI misuse, with no less than 10 states within the U.S. enacting deepfake-related laws. Minnesota became the first state to criminalize the usage of deepfakes that might influence elections and spread misinformation.
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Google and Universal Music are in talks to license artists’ melodies and voices for AI songs, in accordance with an August report from the Financial Times.