Tennessee on Thursday became the first state to protect residents’ right to voice when Gov. Bill Lee (R) signed into law the ELVIS Act, which aims to protect musicians from artificial intelligence replication.
“There are definitely a lot of good things about how AI works,” Lee said. “And in the wrong hands, it could destroy this industry.”
“It can take away from individuals, artists whose unique God-given gifts change lives,” he continued. “They can steal those gifts, impersonate those gifts, and then create counterfeit works that take away the artist’s intellectual property.”
Lee signed the Portrait, Voice, and Image Security Act at Robert’s Western World, a honky-tonk in Nashville known as the birthplace of the genre.
Concerns about artificial intelligence are growing in the music industry, as AI impersonations of singers have gone viral online and come under increased legal scrutiny. Interpretations of artists’ realistic sounds can either imitate their voices or use their music to create new content.
Specifically, this law established protection of artists’ voices and created national civil actions against those who illegally use them without permission.
Given the largely unregulated and rapidly evolving nature of artificial intelligence, it is unclear how effective protections will be. The industry is also attracting attention from Congress, which has long debated how to regulate the industry.
The law, which strengthens protections for the state’s powerful image and likeness, was passed in 1984 during the legal turmoil caused by the death of Elvis Presley, and was the impetus for agreeing to the title of the 2024 bill.
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