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A kerfuffle erupted last week after actor Scarlett Johansson complained that one of OpenAI’s chatbot voices sounded a lot like her. It isn’t hers — the company created it using recordings from someone else. Nevertheless, the firm has suspended the voice out of respect for Johansson’s concerns. But the media flurry has cracked open a broader discussion about peoples’ rights to their own personas. In the age of generative artificial intelligence (genAI), are existing laws sufficient to protect the use of a person’s appearance and voice?

The answer isn’t always clear, says Carys Craig, an intellectual-property scholar at York University in Toronto, Canada, who will be speaking on this topic next month during a Canadian Bar Association webcast.

Several members of the US Congress have, in the past year, called for a federal law to enshrine such protections at the national level. And some legal scholars say that action is needed to improve privacy rights in the United States. But they also caution that hastily written laws might infringe on freedom of speech or create other problems. “It’s complicated,” says Meredith Rose, a legal analyst at the non-profit consumer-advocacy group Public Knowledge in Washington, DC. “There’s a lot that can go wrong.”

“Rushing to regulate this might be a mistake,” Craig says.

Fake me

GenAI can be used to easily clone voices or faces to create deepfakes, in which a person’s likeness is imitated digitally. People have made deepfakes for fun and to promote education or research. However, they’ve also been used to sow disinformation, attempt to sway elections, create non-consensual sexual imagery, or scam people out of money.

Many countries have laws that prevent these kinds of harmful and nefarious activities, regardless of whether they involve AI, Craig says. But when it comes to specifically protecting a persona, existing laws might or might not be sufficient.

Copyright does not apply, says Craig, because it was designed to protect specific works. “From an intellectual-property perspective, the answer to whether we have rights over our voice, for example, is no,” she says. Most discussions about copyright and AI focus instead on whether and how copyrighted material can be used to train the technology, and whether new material that it produces can be copyrighted.

Aside from copyright laws, some regions, including some US states, have ‘publicity rights’ that allow an individual to control the commercial use of their image, to protect celebrities against financial loss. For example, in 1988, long before AI entered the scene, singer and actor Bette Midler won a ‘voice appropriation’ case against the Ford Motor Company, which had used a sound-alike singer to cover one of her songs in a commercial. And in 1992, game-show host Vanna White won a case against the US division of Samsung when it put a robot dressed as her in a commercial.

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