Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a bill protecting artists from unauthorized AI use on Thursday.
The law updates an existing personal rights protection law to include protections for songwriters, performers and music industry professionals from the “misuse of artificial intelligence.”
Tennessee became the first U.S. state to protect musicians from AI 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 the 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 stated at an event announcing the bill in January.
Deepfakes are synthetic media that replicate the voices, images or other aspects of a person and use those features in new contexts. With the rapid development of generative AI, deepfakes have proliferated, including a viral track featuring the deepfake vocals of Drake and The Weeknd.
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 somebody — and I’m not talking about somebody in the famous, money part — but an artist, and then someone just takes it from you, it seems like it should be illegal,” Cher told the Associated Press.
Recently, Taylor Swift’s likeness and voice were used for a false advertising campaign for Le Creuset cookware.
