California has given the go-ahead to a landmark AI invoice to guard performers’ digital likenesses. On Tuesday, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Meeting Invoice 2602, which can go into impact on January 1, 2025. The invoice requires studios and different employers to get consent earlier than utilizing “digital replicas” of performers. Newsom additionally signed AB 1836, which grants related rights to deceased performers, requiring their property’s permission earlier than utilizing their AI likenesses.
AB 2602, launched in April, covers movie, TV, video video games, commercials, audiobooks and non-union performing jobs. Deadline notes its phrases are just like these within the contract that ended the 2023 actors’ strike towards Hollywood studios. SAG-AFTRA, the movie and TV actors’ union that held out for final yr’s deal, strongly supported the invoice. The Movement Image Affiliation first opposed the laws however later switched to a impartial stance after revisions.
The invoice mandates that employers can’t use an AI recreation of an actor’s voice or likeness if it replaces work the performer might have carried out in particular person. It additionally prevents digital replicas if the actor’s contract doesn’t explicitly state how the deepfake shall be used. It additionally voids any such offers signed when the performer didn’t have authorized or union illustration.
The invoice defines a digital duplicate as a “computer-generated, extremely practical digital illustration that’s readily identifiable because the voice or visible likeness of a person that’s embodied in a sound recording, picture, audiovisual work, or transmission wherein the precise particular person both didn’t truly carry out or seem, or the precise particular person did carry out or seem, however the elementary character of the efficiency or look has been materially altered.”
In the meantime, AB 1836 expands California’s postmortem proper of publicity. Hollywood should now get permission from a decedent’s property earlier than utilizing their digital replicas. Deadline notes that exceptions had been included for “satire, remark, criticism and parody, and for sure documentary, biographical or historic initiatives.”
“The invoice, which protects not solely SAG-AFTRA performers however all performers, is a big step ahead,” SAG-AFTRA chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Eire told the The LA Occasions in late August. “Voice and likeness rights, in an age of digital replication, will need to have robust guardrails round licensing to guard from abuse, this invoice gives these guardrails.”
AB2602 handed the California State Senate on August 27 with a 37-1 tally. (The lone holdout was from State Senator Brian Dahle, a Republican.) The invoice then returned to the Meeting (which handed an earlier model in Might) to formalize revisions made throughout Senate negotiations.
On Tuesday, SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher celebrated the passage, which the union fought for. “It’s a momentous day for SAG-AFTRA members and everybody else, as a result of the A.I. protections we fought so exhausting for final yr are actually expanded upon by California regulation because of the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom,” Drescher stated.