Artificial Intelligence Law - Intellectual Property Protection for your voice?; JDSupra, January 22, 2024

Steve Vondran, JDSupra ; Artificial Intelligence Law - Intellectual Property Protection for your voice?

"With the advent of AI technology capable of replicating a person's voice and utilizing it for commercial purposes, several key legal issues are likely to emerge under California's right of publicity law. The right of publicity refers to an individual's right to control and profit from their own name, image, likeness, or voice.

Determining the extent of a person's control over their own voice will likely become a contentious legal matter given the rise of AI technology. In 2024, with a mere prompt and a push of a button, a creator can generate highly accurate voice replicas, potentially allowing companies to utilize a person's voice without their explicit permission for example using a AI generated song in a video, or podcast, or using it as a voice-over for a commercial project. This sounds like fun new technology, until you realize that in states like California where a "right of publicity law" exists a persons VOICE can be a protectable asset that one can sue to protect others who wrongfully misuse their voice for commercial advertising purposes.

This blog will discuss a few new legal issues I see arising in our wonderful new digital age being fueled by the massive onset of Generative AI technology (which really just means you input prompts into an AI tool and it will generate art, text, images, music, etc."

Generative AI ChatGPT Is Going To Be Everywhere Once The API Portal Gets Soon Opened, Stupefying AI Ethics And AI Law; Forbes, January 22, 2023

 Lance Eliot, Forbes ; Generative AI ChatGPT Is Going To Be Everywhere Once The API Portal Gets Soon Opened, Stupefying AI Ethics And AI Law

"Some adamantly believe that this will be akin to letting loose the Kraken, namely that all kinds of bad things are going to arise. Others see this as making available a crucial resource that can boost tons of other apps by leveraging the grand capabilities of ChatGPT. It is either the worst of times or the best of times. We will herein consider both sides of the debate and you can decide for yourself which camp you land in.

Into all of this comes a slew of AI Ethics and AI Law considerations.

Please be aware that there are ongoing efforts to imbue Ethical AI principles into the development and fielding of AI apps. A growing contingent of concerned and erstwhile AI ethicists are trying to ensure that efforts to devise and adopt AI takes into account a view of doing AI For Good and averting AI For Bad. Likewise, there are proposed new AI laws that are being bandied around as potential solutions to keep AI endeavors from going amok on human rights and the like. For my ongoing and extensive coverage of AI Ethics and AI Law, see the link here and the link here, just to name a few.

There have been growing qualms that ChatGPT and other similar AI apps have an ugly underbelly that maybe we aren’t ready to handle. For example, you might have heard that students in schools are potentially able to cheat when it comes to writing assigned essays via using ChatGPT. The AI does all the writing for them. Meanwhile, the student is able to seemingly scot-free turn in the essay as though they did the writing from their own noggin. Not what we presumably want AI to do for humankind."