Tennessee's enactment of the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security (ELVIS) Act, offers protections against the unauthorized use of artificial intelligence (AI) to replicate an individual’s likeness, image, and voice. The ELVIS Act updates Tennessee’s Protection of Personal Rights law to include these modern safeguards to protect its residents—including, though importantly, not only its rich community of artists and musicians—from the potential misuse of AI technology. 

But protecting the rights individuals have in their voices against fakes is not new. While California's statutory publicity right was considered inapplicable to the use of a soundalike, Bette Midler and Tom Waits were both able to stop advertisers from using human soundalikes using California's common law right of publicity. There is no reason to think those efforts would have been less successful if the advertisement relied on AI to impersonate the respective singers' voices.

In addition to expressly legislating against soundalikes of any origin, the ELVIS Act takes other important steps forward to address the latest risks created by AI-generated impersonations. One of those is the reach of the protection. Most right of publicity laws are context-dependent. In California's statutes (Cal. Civ. Code §3344, as well as §990 applicable to posthumous rights), for example, the use of another's voice is only prohibited if the use is “on or in products, merchandise, or goods, or for purposes of advertising or selling, or soliciting purchases of products, merchandise, goods or services.” Common law rights would likely be similarly limited. The ELVIS Act has no such context limitation.  

A second advance is removing limits on those eligible for the protection of their voice and image. While not all publicity rights are limited, it is not always clear that a given law would protect non-celebrities. Indeed, the Midler and Waits cases focused on their voices as an important and known aspect of their celebrity, and thus, the use of fakes had an actionable economic consequence. Such a consideration would not be required under the ELVIS Act.

The broadening of the applicability of publicity rights will be necessary for such laws to be an effective weapon against deep fakes that promote misinformation. As other states and, potentially, the United States Congress are looking to offer additional arrows to that quiver, the ELVIS Act offers some guidance to consider.