6 ms·

No Fakes Act wants to protect actors and singers from unauthorized AI replicas

63 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

thriftwy 3y ago
That would be awful. No more neuro covers? No more Hitler singing?
- dvngnt_ 3y ago
  The rights would apply throughout a person’s lifetime and, for their estate, 70 years after their death. The bill includes an exception for using digital duplicates for parodies, satire, and criticism
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Every day draws us closer to The Right to Read world. If someone is copying and selling your work as created by you, that is one thing. Sounding like you, well guess what, your voice isn't copyrightable, and really in I see no world in which we'd want that. Moreso, this is going to end up in lawsuits like we saw in the open source world in the 2000s in the SCO vs Linux debacle. "That voice sounds kinda like me, so it must have been trained on my data!"
- sbassi 3y ago
  Hitler's heir won't sue anybody, they didn't do it even when copyright for them was current.
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    But what if I want band A to cover song B for me? Trivial to do with neural networks.
    - nickthegreek 3y ago
      I want this so bad. Take my playlist and jumble up the artists and songs.
adocomplete 3y ago
Good luck enforcing it. The genie is out of the bottle.
- telotortium 3y ago
  Copyright enforcement should suffice for commercial works.
- g232089 3y ago
  They will enforce it the way copyright is already enforced. If you use a fake face in your film no platform will be able to host it.
claytongulick 3y ago
It's a tough issue, but I believe that there's a need for some sort of regulation. Joe Rogan has mentioned a few times that people are using a deep fake of him to sell penis enhancement products. Should that be ok? What about character assassination stuff? Should I be able to make a damaging deep fake of a person I'm competing with for a position, post it to YouTube, and then arrange for a link to be sent to HR? Should I be allowed to make a deep fake of a rival for a romantic interest, putting them in a compromising position? I'm not sure what the solution is, and I'm not a fan of knee-jerk legislation - but in this case I understand the need for something. I believe in self-ownership, protecting my rights to my own image and voice seems reasonable. Of course, as always, the devil is in the details. As others have posted, this could end up being messy in court - how similar does an image need to be to be considered a copy? How do you develop objective standards for that?
- yoyohello13 3y ago
  Isn't there already legislation around this? Random people can't use Micky Mouse to sell penis enhancement products either. Seems like the same laws should apply for deepfakes. Also, fabricating incrimination emails or writings is defamation. I assume making a damaging deep fake would also apply.
  - SllX 3y ago
    Well Mickey Mouse is trademarked. The earliest cartoons fall out of copyright next year, but Mickey Mouse himself will still be an identifiable mark of the Disney Corporation and therefore you can sue. A deepfake is a recreation of the likeness of a person though, and you can’t trademark your likeness so the same laws wouldn’t apply. You would need different laws.
- autokad 3y ago
  > Joe Rogan has mentioned a few times that people are using a deep fake of him to sell penis enhancement products. shouldnt this already fall under false advertising laws?
  - 3y ago
aidenn0 3y ago
Is there a reason that this isn't covered under existing Personality rights (which are, admittedly patchwork in the US[1], but do generally exist in some form throughout the union)? I can't make a video game with Brock Purdy as QB, without paying, so a deepfake of him playing football is probably also covered? 1: Indiana has the strongest in the US. The name, image, likeness, signature, photograph, gestures, distinctive appearances, and mannerisms of Woodrow Wilson are still protected in Indiana (100 years after death, and he died in '24).
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  I was just wondering that too, I’ve dealt with release forms before and that concept is entirely at the state level Its starting to look like the AI scare will force an interstate commerce based regulation on image and likeness release thats a good thing, finally some harmonization on this concept
  - mikem170 3y ago
    How big a deal is harmonizing things across state lines? If no federal constitutional dictates are being violated does harmonization just amount to a convenience for big companies, at the expense of local self rule as per the constitution? Worst case you end up with multi-nationals bribing one set of federal politicians to get national laws enshrined. One stop corruption.
    - yieldcrv 3y ago
      not that big of a deal? the regulation of interstate commerce is an unlimited dictate thats also part of the constitution, as all commerce is interstate commerce for the last century there is no federalism left in this country outside of what the federal government merely tolerates from the states, and in the parallel judicial systems against persons there is no prioritization of “local self rule”, an ethos of the original republic and 10th amendment, the federal government has subjugated all states since then and throws them a bone here and there since it technically derives support from the collection of states with that in mind, this specific industry of image and likeness releases has been long overdue for one framework to rule them all. the issue isnt big companies, its small operators and enthusiasts that dont really know what text to put in their release forms and always have been operating in multiple states.
mchusma 3y ago
The act may be good, but this 70 years after death thing was a disaster for copyright. Seems like 5 years after death is plenty to avoid any issues.
rvz 3y ago
AI grifters realizing why Meta paid celebrities to clone their voices for their AI chatbots. These same celebrities are ready to take anyone to court to collect their money for unauthorized cloning of their voices for commercial purposes and it costs them almost nothing with a greater chance of them winning.
oldpersonintx 3y ago
This won't end or even slow down AI in entertainment...we'll just get fully-synthesized "stars" that live forever, created from scratch.
- artninja1988 3y ago
  There's already a kpop group that goes in this direction https://youtu.be/1wGOHbcQKIc?si=hKti2i2gKq_pQ16T https://youtu.be/1wGOHbcQKIc?si=hKti2i2gKq_pQ16T Obviously not 100% ai generated; there's motion capture/ modeling and a real singer is recoding, but yeah. Going in that direction imo
  - aperrien 3y ago
    So... Vocaloids?
- jchanimal 3y ago
  And they will have a personal relationship with everyone.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I wonder if they’ll be vtubers or fully automated.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  If not a staple, at least common in cyperpunk. There is a [Warning: Time-sucking Wiki] list on TVTropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VirtualCelebrity https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VirtualCelebrity
111111101101 3y ago
People really don't see where this is going, do they? Replicas are the last of their worries. Actors and singers should be more worried about being replaced by perfect, completely artificial people. It's like when extras were worried about being replaced by body scans. No, ThisPersonDoesNotExist will replace you all, silly.
- gamblor956 3y ago
  Hollywood productions have already begun shifting back toward using extras instead of CGI actors. It turns out it's a lot cheaper to just tell a real person to do something different in real time a bunch of times over the course of a day then it is to tell animators to animate a bunch of CGI people differently a bunch of times. Extras don't get paid that much to begin with (a fixed, flat rate which varies depending on the type of production i.e., commercial vs TV vs movie). Digital artists don't get paid all that much either, but the disparity is large enough that you actually lose money (compared to hiring a real-person extra) if you need to re-animate a CGI extra more than once. And quite frankly, given the limited VFX budgets most productions have to work with, it's better to spend the VFX budget on actual visual effects than on background filler. Otherwise, you end up with Dr Strange 2, Secret Invasion, and the Book of Boba Fett...
  - jameshart 3y ago
    Wait until the LLM interface to the behavioral model of your virtual extras means you can tell the CGI actors to do something different a bunch of times without having to have an animator involved... and they don't need you to provide craft services and wardrobe or complain about being stood on their feet for hours.
    - gamblor956 3y ago
      I'm not sure anyone alive now will still be alive when this magical feat happens. After all, people were saying that robots would talk like humans and be indistinguishable from sentient life before you or I were ever born. Decades later, even with CPUs with more than 1,000,000,000,000x the processing power it's still news when a company releases a robot that can walk in a straight line without falling over, which is something that human babies can do before they're able to figure out how to control their own bowel functions.
haltist 3y ago
Trying to legislate digital content generation seems like a waste of time and resources. I am not much of a libertarian but this is one area where I agree with minimizing laws and regulations.
Animats 3y ago
And no more "tribute" bands.
kstrauser 3y ago
I mentioned this in the thread about the RIAA getting worked up over this: Should that be illegal, as long as the result isn't described as being the real person? To repeat my analogy, say I want to cover Guns N' Roses. I can hire a guitarist that could copy Slash's guitar parts (but can't say it's Slash playing them). Is that fundamentally different from getting an AI to sing Axl's vocals (as long as I don't say it's the real Axl singing)? It feels different, somehow, but I'm not sure that's philosophically defensible. Help me think this through. Why are AI replicas that don't claim to be the original different from a cover band or an impressionist?
- sdrinf 3y ago
  Thinking out loud, I think the governing aspect of this is fidelity. Cover bands, and impressionist are always going to be delta away from the original. Current-gen replicas can pass the generic test of "is this indistinguishable from the original by laymen?". This gets especially messy with movie actors. Specifically -several extremely high-profile movie actors _specialize_ in the sort of roles they take to project a certain persona, and be _the_ guy for that role. It's also known within producer circles, that a single actor can move the sales needle +-~$X0M revenues; which is part of their valueprop. Present-gen replica tech poses an existential risk both for brand building, and exclusivity of these actors.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Just doing a little googling, it looks like cover bands actually so need to license their songs, or the venue does, and if they want to record their covers they need a license for that as well.
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    That’s a compulsory license, though. If you pay the fee, you’re allowed to play the music.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      That seems more like a “let’s not sweat the small stuff” type decision to me. It seems like exactly the sort of decision that would have to be revisited if huge industries got built on AI. I mean, ultimately if you had a “virtual musician” that could do “live performances” of any cover with 100% fidelity on demand while running on your phone, I think we wouldn’t treat that like a human cover band. Doing so would just kill off the idea of music IP (which, I’m definitely not going to defend the current mess that is IP law, but people have been arguing about it for a long time, so I suspect we as a society won’t just toss it out now). It also occurred to me while writing this that this sort of virtual musician wouldn’t even really be like a cover band, because they don’t even play at a venue. They play just for you. I suspect there are no laws, at least being enforced, that cover what sort of songs a musician can play in private, in their friends’ houses. So, I think this is really going to break our intuition.
MollyRealized 3y ago
I really wish they'd stop the overly cutesy 'contrived acronym' thing with legislation.
swader999 3y ago
My grand kids will get to see the 9.59942^23 Rambo movie.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
light_hue_1 3y ago
Truly horrible. If this kind of small-minded anti-intellectual and anti-science act had been put in place in 1900, the "No Fakes Act" would have meant no phonographs or recording of music. You must listen to actual music, not fake replicas recorded on cylinders or disks. Just like we have a revolution in music because of recording technology, and a revolution in art because of photography, we will have a revolution in movies because of replicas. People like this want to stop progress at all costs. Society should wither away, never changing, never adapting to new technologies, never discovering anything new. Until some country that isn't so small minded ignores these arbitrary rules and eventually takes over as the preeminent scientific and cultural power in the world. We have always had the right to impersonate people and clone their voices. Since the dawn of time. This is taking away yet another fundamental right of everyone in order to commercialize it for massive companies. Just like copyright became this multi-lifetime shackle around the necks of society recently, this too will further restrict the development of our culture.
matteoraso 3y ago
This just means that companies will only work with people that agree to have their likeness be replicated by AI. I really think that we'll start to see celebrities that are entirely artificial within 20 years.
RecycledEle 3y ago
These idiots would ban recording devices to protect live performances.

63 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

thriftwy 3y ago

That would be awful. No more neuro covers? No more Hitler singing?

dvngnt_ 3y ago
The rights would apply throughout a person’s lifetime and, for their estate, 70 years after their death. The bill includes an exception for using digital duplicates for parodies, satire, and criticism
- pixl97 3y ago
  Every day draws us closer to The Right to Read world. If someone is copying and selling your work as created by you, that is one thing. Sounding like you, well guess what, your voice isn't copyrightable, and really in I see no world in which we'd want that. Moreso, this is going to end up in lawsuits like we saw in the open source world in the 2000s in the SCO vs Linux debacle. "That voice sounds kinda like me, so it must have been trained on my data!"
sbassi 3y ago
Hitler's heir won't sue anybody, they didn't do it even when copyright for them was current.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  But what if I want band A to cover song B for me? Trivial to do with neural networks.
  - nickthegreek 3y ago
    I want this so bad. Take my playlist and jumble up the artists and songs.

adocomplete 3y ago

Good luck enforcing it. The genie is out of the bottle.

telotortium 3y ago
Copyright enforcement should suffice for commercial works.
g232089 3y ago
They will enforce it the way copyright is already enforced. If you use a fake face in your film no platform will be able to host it.

claytongulick 3y ago

It's a tough issue, but I believe that there's a need for some sort of regulation. Joe Rogan has mentioned a few times that people are using a deep fake of him to sell penis enhancement products. Should that be ok? What about character assassination stuff? Should I be able to make a damaging deep fake of a person I'm competing with for a position, post it to YouTube, and then arrange for a link to be sent to HR? Should I be allowed to make a deep fake of a rival for a romantic interest, putting them in a compromising position? I'm not sure what the solution is, and I'm not a fan of knee-jerk legislation - but in this case I understand the need for something. I believe in self-ownership, protecting my rights to my own image and voice seems reasonable. Of course, as always, the devil is in the details. As others have posted, this could end up being messy in court - how similar does an image need to be to be considered a copy? How do you develop objective standards for that?

yoyohello13 3y ago
Isn't there already legislation around this? Random people can't use Micky Mouse to sell penis enhancement products either. Seems like the same laws should apply for deepfakes. Also, fabricating incrimination emails or writings is defamation. I assume making a damaging deep fake would also apply.
- SllX 3y ago
  Well Mickey Mouse is trademarked. The earliest cartoons fall out of copyright next year, but Mickey Mouse himself will still be an identifiable mark of the Disney Corporation and therefore you can sue. A deepfake is a recreation of the likeness of a person though, and you can’t trademark your likeness so the same laws wouldn’t apply. You would need different laws.
autokad 3y ago
> Joe Rogan has mentioned a few times that people are using a deep fake of him to sell penis enhancement products. shouldnt this already fall under false advertising laws?
- 3y ago

aidenn0 3y ago

Is there a reason that this isn't covered under existing Personality rights (which are, admittedly patchwork in the US[1], but do generally exist in some form throughout the union)? I can't make a video game with Brock Purdy as QB, without paying, so a deepfake of him playing football is probably also covered? 1: Indiana has the strongest in the US. The name, image, likeness, signature, photograph, gestures, distinctive appearances, and mannerisms of Woodrow Wilson are still protected in Indiana (100 years after death, and he died in '24).

yieldcrv 3y ago
I was just wondering that too, I’ve dealt with release forms before and that concept is entirely at the state level Its starting to look like the AI scare will force an interstate commerce based regulation on image and likeness release thats a good thing, finally some harmonization on this concept
- mikem170 3y ago
  How big a deal is harmonizing things across state lines? If no federal constitutional dictates are being violated does harmonization just amount to a convenience for big companies, at the expense of local self rule as per the constitution? Worst case you end up with multi-nationals bribing one set of federal politicians to get national laws enshrined. One stop corruption.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    not that big of a deal? the regulation of interstate commerce is an unlimited dictate thats also part of the constitution, as all commerce is interstate commerce for the last century there is no federalism left in this country outside of what the federal government merely tolerates from the states, and in the parallel judicial systems against persons there is no prioritization of “local self rule”, an ethos of the original republic and 10th amendment, the federal government has subjugated all states since then and throws them a bone here and there since it technically derives support from the collection of states with that in mind, this specific industry of image and likeness releases has been long overdue for one framework to rule them all. the issue isnt big companies, its small operators and enthusiasts that dont really know what text to put in their release forms and always have been operating in multiple states.

mchusma 3y ago

The act may be good, but this 70 years after death thing was a disaster for copyright. Seems like 5 years after death is plenty to avoid any issues.

rvz 3y ago

AI grifters realizing why Meta paid celebrities to clone their voices for their AI chatbots. These same celebrities are ready to take anyone to court to collect their money for unauthorized cloning of their voices for commercial purposes and it costs them almost nothing with a greater chance of them winning.

oldpersonintx 3y ago

This won't end or even slow down AI in entertainment...we'll just get fully-synthesized "stars" that live forever, created from scratch.

artninja1988 3y ago
There's already a kpop group that goes in this direction https://youtu.be/1wGOHbcQKIc?si=hKti2i2gKq_pQ16T https://youtu.be/1wGOHbcQKIc?si=hKti2i2gKq_pQ16T Obviously not 100% ai generated; there's motion capture/ modeling and a real singer is recoding, but yeah. Going in that direction imo
- aperrien 3y ago
  So... Vocaloids?
jchanimal 3y ago
And they will have a personal relationship with everyone.
bee_rider 3y ago
I wonder if they’ll be vtubers or fully automated.
Terr_ 3y ago
If not a staple, at least common in cyperpunk. There is a [Warning: Time-sucking Wiki] list on TVTropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VirtualCelebrity https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VirtualCelebrity

111111101101 3y ago

People really don't see where this is going, do they? Replicas are the last of their worries. Actors and singers should be more worried about being replaced by perfect, completely artificial people. It's like when extras were worried about being replaced by body scans. No, ThisPersonDoesNotExist will replace you all, silly.

gamblor956 3y ago
Hollywood productions have already begun shifting back toward using extras instead of CGI actors. It turns out it's a lot cheaper to just tell a real person to do something different in real time a bunch of times over the course of a day then it is to tell animators to animate a bunch of CGI people differently a bunch of times. Extras don't get paid that much to begin with (a fixed, flat rate which varies depending on the type of production i.e., commercial vs TV vs movie). Digital artists don't get paid all that much either, but the disparity is large enough that you actually lose money (compared to hiring a real-person extra) if you need to re-animate a CGI extra more than once. And quite frankly, given the limited VFX budgets most productions have to work with, it's better to spend the VFX budget on actual visual effects than on background filler. Otherwise, you end up with Dr Strange 2, Secret Invasion, and the Book of Boba Fett...
- jameshart 3y ago
  Wait until the LLM interface to the behavioral model of your virtual extras means you can tell the CGI actors to do something different a bunch of times without having to have an animator involved... and they don't need you to provide craft services and wardrobe or complain about being stood on their feet for hours.
  - gamblor956 3y ago
    I'm not sure anyone alive now will still be alive when this magical feat happens. After all, people were saying that robots would talk like humans and be indistinguishable from sentient life before you or I were ever born. Decades later, even with CPUs with more than 1,000,000,000,000x the processing power it's still news when a company releases a robot that can walk in a straight line without falling over, which is something that human babies can do before they're able to figure out how to control their own bowel functions.

haltist 3y ago

Trying to legislate digital content generation seems like a waste of time and resources. I am not much of a libertarian but this is one area where I agree with minimizing laws and regulations.

Animats 3y ago

And no more "tribute" bands.

kstrauser 3y ago

I mentioned this in the thread about the RIAA getting worked up over this: Should that be illegal, as long as the result isn't described as being the real person? To repeat my analogy, say I want to cover Guns N' Roses. I can hire a guitarist that could copy Slash's guitar parts (but can't say it's Slash playing them). Is that fundamentally different from getting an AI to sing Axl's vocals (as long as I don't say it's the real Axl singing)? It feels different, somehow, but I'm not sure that's philosophically defensible. Help me think this through. Why are AI replicas that don't claim to be the original different from a cover band or an impressionist?

sdrinf 3y ago
Thinking out loud, I think the governing aspect of this is fidelity. Cover bands, and impressionist are always going to be delta away from the original. Current-gen replicas can pass the generic test of "is this indistinguishable from the original by laymen?". This gets especially messy with movie actors. Specifically -several extremely high-profile movie actors _specialize_ in the sort of roles they take to project a certain persona, and be _the_ guy for that role. It's also known within producer circles, that a single actor can move the sales needle +-~$X0M revenues; which is part of their valueprop. Present-gen replica tech poses an existential risk both for brand building, and exclusivity of these actors.
bee_rider 3y ago
Just doing a little googling, it looks like cover bands actually so need to license their songs, or the venue does, and if they want to record their covers they need a license for that as well.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  That’s a compulsory license, though. If you pay the fee, you’re allowed to play the music.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    That seems more like a “let’s not sweat the small stuff” type decision to me. It seems like exactly the sort of decision that would have to be revisited if huge industries got built on AI. I mean, ultimately if you had a “virtual musician” that could do “live performances” of any cover with 100% fidelity on demand while running on your phone, I think we wouldn’t treat that like a human cover band. Doing so would just kill off the idea of music IP (which, I’m definitely not going to defend the current mess that is IP law, but people have been arguing about it for a long time, so I suspect we as a society won’t just toss it out now). It also occurred to me while writing this that this sort of virtual musician wouldn’t even really be like a cover band, because they don’t even play at a venue. They play just for you. I suspect there are no laws, at least being enforced, that cover what sort of songs a musician can play in private, in their friends’ houses. So, I think this is really going to break our intuition.

MollyRealized 3y ago

I really wish they'd stop the overly cutesy 'contrived acronym' thing with legislation.

swader999 3y ago

My grand kids will get to see the 9.59942^23 Rambo movie.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

light_hue_1 3y ago

Truly horrible. If this kind of small-minded anti-intellectual and anti-science act had been put in place in 1900, the "No Fakes Act" would have meant no phonographs or recording of music. You must listen to actual music, not fake replicas recorded on cylinders or disks. Just like we have a revolution in music because of recording technology, and a revolution in art because of photography, we will have a revolution in movies because of replicas. People like this want to stop progress at all costs. Society should wither away, never changing, never adapting to new technologies, never discovering anything new. Until some country that isn't so small minded ignores these arbitrary rules and eventually takes over as the preeminent scientific and cultural power in the world. We have always had the right to impersonate people and clone their voices. Since the dawn of time. This is taking away yet another fundamental right of everyone in order to commercialize it for massive companies. Just like copyright became this multi-lifetime shackle around the necks of society recently, this too will further restrict the development of our culture.

matteoraso 3y ago

This just means that companies will only work with people that agree to have their likeness be replicated by AI. I really think that we'll start to see celebrities that are entirely artificial within 20 years.

RecycledEle 3y ago

These idiots would ban recording devices to protect live performances.