Industry & Advocacy News

Authors Guild Welcomes Introduction of NO FAKES Act

The legislation, which the AG consulted on, will give creators and others necessary tools to fight unauthorized AI-generated imitations and fakes.

Artificial Intelligence

July 31, 2024

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The Authors Guild strongly supports the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe (NO FAKES) Act introduced today by Senators Chris Coons (D-DE), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). This bipartisan legislation addresses the critical issue of unauthorized AI-generated imitations and fakes that are plaguing creators and siphoning away their income.  

The NO FAKES Act prevents the creation and dissemination of deep fakes and other unauthorized uses of voice or visual likeness. It does so by creating a property right in the AI use of a person’s voice or visual likeness, providing the individual with the exclusive right to use (or license or transfer) in their “digital replicas”—defined as a “computer-generated highly realistic electronic representation readily identifiable” as the voice or visual representation of an individual.

The legislation is a necessary intervention to stop the misuse of the images, likenesses, and voices of actors and celebrities, as well as politicians and others. If passed, the NO FAKES Act could prove effective in stemming the tide of deep-fake AI-generated images, videos, and voices generally. To be clear, the legislation does not protect against text-based, AI-generated imitations and appropriations of authors’ names, styles, and writing voices, which the Authors Guild has been actively lobbying for; nevertheless, authors would benefit from the NO FAKES Act’s protections of visual likeness and voice. If enacted, the legislation would give authors a legal remedy against AI-generated avatars of the authors or other AI generated uses of an authors’ image or voice, including, for instance, an author’s voice used to narrate without their permission, deepfake videos of an author speaking, or a hyper-realistic AI-created image of an author used in marketing materials without their consent.  

“The Authors Guild thanks Senators Coons, Blackburn, Klobuchar, and Tillis for introducing the NO FAKES Act. It marks a significant step in protecting creators’ rights to their own persona,” said Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild. “By prohibiting the unauthorized use of AI-generated replicas in audiovisual and sound recordings and establishing clear legal guidelines and liability for misuse, this bill helps safeguard creators from unauthorized and unpaid uses of their images and voices. We also appreciate that the bill includes provisions to protect First Amendment rights while still addressing the core issues of consent and compensation for creators.”

We are grateful to the Senators and staff who have worked on this important bill and hope to continue our fruitful discussions with them to create accountability for AI development and use. We are especially interested in laws that will address the growing problem of AI-generated imitations of authors’ works, writing styles, and voices, and uses of authors’ names to sell low-quality, AI-generated books and articles. We urge Congress to move swiftly in passing the NO FAKES Act and other pending legislation to protect creators and the creative industries from unregulated AI development and use. 

Read the full text of the bill (PDF) here.

You can also read a one-pager (PDF) here and find a section-by-section summary of the bill (PDF) here.