Tennessee has become the first US state to protect musicians from artificial intelligence that could 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 unauthorized use of a person’s voice to Tennessee’s list of protected rights.
The ELVIS Act ensures that “no one will steal the voices of Tennessee artists,” Lee said at an event announcing the bill in January.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee. Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images
Deepfakes are synthetic media that replicate a person’s voices, images, or other aspects and use those features in new contexts. With the rapid development of generative artificial intelligence, deepfakes have proliferated, including a viral track featuring the deepfake voices 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, if you work forever to become someone — and I’m not talking about someone on the famous side, the money side — but an artist, and then someone takes that away from you, it seems like it should be illegal,” Cher told All ‘Associated Press.
Recently, Taylor Swift’s likeness and voice were used for a fake advertising campaign for Le Creuset cookware.
Related: Taylor Swift is the latest victim of an AI-powered deepfake as Meta runs fake ads
The “speed, reach, credibility” and “access” that non-technical Internet users now possess to create highly realistic deepfakes have “all combined to create this witch brew,” Matthew Ferraro, an attorney at WilmerHale LLP that followed deepfake laws, he told Bloomberg.
“People often talk about the slow, glacial pace of the legislative process, and this is one area where that’s really not the case,” Ferraro told the newspaper.
Lawmakers in other states have taken steps to address the misuse of artificial intelligence, with at least 10 states in the US having passed deepfake-related laws. Minnesota became the first state to criminalize the use of deepfakes that could 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, according to an August report from the agency Financial Times.