Elvis Has Left the Deepfake

Elvis returned to the building—the Tennessee state capitol—last week, or at least a legislative tribute to the King showed up in Nashville. A number of voices hailed this sighting, including that of SAG-AFTRA, which hopes this will lead to a proliferation of regulatory replicas across the country.

On March 22, Tennessee legislators signed the “Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security” Act . They wrote it to protect the voices and visual likenesses of performers from AI-generated deep fakes and voice clones.

Or at least unauthorized versions. (E.g., Authentic Brands Group owns “Elvis Presley Enterprises and Iconoverse,” so if it wants to create fakes, it can.)

The ELVIS act passed both the Tennessee House and Senate unopposed—and the bill went from proposal on January 10, through the state General Assembly to the governor’s desk in a matter of weeks, certainly unprecedented nowadays. If you thought the legislation potentially forcing a change of ownership of TikTok was quick, think again.

Of the bill’s passage, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA, National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator, said, “We hope this legislation will serve as a model for policymakers across the country and offer the support of our members who work across the music, television, film, broadcast and video game industries. SAG-AFTRA is focused on protecting its members’ images, voices, and likenesses from being replicated by AI without their informed consent and fair compensation. The ELVIS Act is an important step in this direction.”

If AI fakes a performer, and if it happens in Tennessee, the miscreants are in for a legal ass-whoopin’.

The SAG-AFTRA contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) protects  the actors from AI exploitation. For example, “voice actors” must be human, not digital. And while actors must submit to a scan for purposes of creating digital replicas if they want the gig (according to SAG-AFTRA: “Producers have always been able to refuse to hire any person for any reason (except for those covered under applicable law). Even before this contract, producers could, and did make being scanned a condition of employment, they just were less open about it.”)

Under the new contract producers must provide advance notice of the scanning and also must get consent from the actor whenever they plan to use the digital replica. However, the union admits: “The employer legally owns all materials created from your work on a motion picture. With these new terms in place, they cannot use them without your consent and, in most cases, further payments.” The “in most cases” clause is the one that should be troubling for performers. Guess who that won’t work out so well for.

Similarly, the Writers Guild of America contract with the AMPTP has language to protect writers from complete displacement by AI. For example, the studios can’t use AI to generate full scripts that humans can then edit. And after humans have written a script, the studio can’t use AI to edit it (though this seems dubious at most).

Which brings us back to the ELVIS Act. Tennessee governor Bill Lee said, “From Beale Street to Broadway, to Bristol and beyond, Tennessee is known for our rich artistic heritage that tells the story of our great state. As the technology landscape evolves with artificial intelligence, I thank the General Assembly for its partnership in creating legal protection for our best-in-class artists and songwriters.”

What they’re really protecting, just as the member companies of the AMPTP are, is the ability to generate revenue from performances, something that actors and musicians have long proven an ability to do and which AI is still on the edges of.

However, when it comes to achieving monetization, the 2024 Digital Media Trends report from consultancy Deloitte shows that members of Gen Z (1997 to 2009) and the Millennials (1983-1996) show an increasing comfort with AI.

For example, 25 percent of Gen Z and 30 percent of Millennials think that “TV shows and movies written by generative AI could be more interesting than content written by humans.” For Gen X (1966-1982) the number is 20 percent and the Boomers (1947-1965) and Matures the number is 16 percent, which seems to indicate that with age comes an appreciation of people.

But it also goes to the point that those who are going to watch more shows and movies, given their comparative youth, tend to think digital creations are just fine, thank you.

There is another finding in the Deloitte study that should start some alarm bells in executive offices: 47% of Gen Z and about a third of Millennials say that social media videos and live streams are their favorite forms of video. And 60% of Gen Z and over 50% of Millennials prefer watching user-generated content (i.e., not professionally produced) “because they don’t have to spend time searching for what to watch.”

Say you’re at a studio. The price of people is going up. The price of processors is going down. And a younger audience seems to be comfortable with digital creations. Deloitte found that approximately 60 percent of Americans surveyed play video games for an average nine hours per week, and while the performers in some of those games look real, obviously they’re not.

So what do you do? Odds are that something or someone will give the ELVIS Act a swerve, make an adjustment to the next set of contracts, and a place an order with NVIDIA for a whole bunch of GPUs and servers.

Cover image courtesy of Microsoft Bing Image Creator.