What rights do creators have in the age of A.I.—and who actually enforces them? How can an artist appropriate appropriately in the digital age? With CULTURED‘s Know Your Rights column, Katarina Feder, the vice president of the Artists Rights Society (ARS), is here to answer everything you wanted to know about artists’ rights but were afraid to ask. The inquiries below are inspired by real conundrums presented to ARS, which has worked to protect the intellectual property rights of thousands of visual artists and estates from around the world since 1987. To have your question answered for a future edition of this column, send an inquiry to knowyourrights@ars.com.
I’m an actor whose fame hovers somewhere between the B- and C-lists. When people see me on Broadway, they probably read my bio in Playbill and say, “Oh, right. He was good in that.” Anyway, I’ve been approached by an A.I. company that wants to use my voice and likeness for content. Ordinarily I’d say no right away, but I’m going through a divorce and I could really use the money. What are the pros and cons of doing this?
Performers today are torn between two impulses: to protest and persist in their craft, or to cash in because they figure it’s all over anyway. The A.I. voice generator ElevenLabs has convinced such celebrities as Art Garfunkel and David Hasselhoff to do the latter. Brands can pay to make their audio likenesses say whatever they want: imagine a podcast advertisement where the Hoff tries to sell you sunscreen, or Garfunkel hawks you an actual spice mix of parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. Thanks to this platform, you can now enjoy a new audiobook version of The Odyssey read by A.I. Michael Caine, the actor who once said of his appearance in the 1987 film Jaws: The Revenge, “I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.”
You don’t need to be going through a divorce, or in need of a terrific house, to be considering this. Meta has bought the rights to use the voices of stars like Judi Dench, Kristen Bell, and John Cena. Payouts likely depend on how unique or marketable your voice is—and I must admit that I have no idea what Art Garfunkel sounds like—but for a Broadway actor, it’s an attractive stream of passive income in exchange for little to no effort.
Now, let’s consider what you are actually selling. Legally, what’s on the table isn’t copyrightable. You can’t copyright a voice or a face. Copyright covers fixed works, not the person who made them. What is on the table is your right of publicity: the commercial value of your name, voice, signature, photograph, and likeness. The laws protecting these are a 50-state patchwork. Luckily for Hollywood celebrities, California is among the strongest jurisdictions (Illinois, Tennessee, New York, Montana and Maine all have digital replica laws on the books, too).
These state laws are part of why Sam Altman’s dream to have ChatGPT talk like Scarlett Johansson in the 2013 movie Her fell flat. Johansson had meetings with OpenAI, declined to let them use her voice, and then was surprised to discover a ChatGPT voice that sounded just like her. She lawyered up; the company pulled the “Sky” voice as a feature. To pre-empt similar unauthorized A.I. usage, certain celebrities are trademarking their best-known lines. Matthew McConaughey has registered trademark protection for his “alright, alright, alright” from Dazed and Confused (1993).
More uniform legal protections may be on the way. In the U.S., the NO FAKES Act (Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe) would prevent A.I. exploitation of a person’s vocal or visual likeness, whether they’re famous or not, and even if that likeness hasn’t been trademarked. (The bill is currently stalled in committee.) In Japan, a bill similarly guards against the use of celebrities’ voices without consent and the manipulation of their images into sexual deepfakes. Microdramas for video reel apps are big business in China, earning more now than the country’s theatrical box office, and many of these are becoming fully A.I.-generated. And A.I. face theft in the country is rampant, with many cases that have reached the courts.
Let’s address your divorce, because it’s relevant here. New York used to treat your fame as divisible: in Elkus v. Elkus (1991), the husband of the opera singer Frederica von Stade won a ruling that her career and celebrity status were marital property on the strength of the decade he had spent as her voice coach while she went from earning $2,250 a year to $621,878. That’s no longer a possibility: In 2015, New York amended the Domestic Relations Law to bar courts from treating “celebrity goodwill” as marital property.
But that amendment protects fame, not contracts. Today, your voice is untouchable. The day you sign, it becomes a revenue stream with a number attached, and revenue streams are precisely what equitable distribution was built to divide. You would be handing your ex-spouse an asset that didn’t legally exist the day before, filed under passive income.
Talk to your lawyer to make sure you’re at the point where new income would not be considered a marital asset. If you decide to go through with the A.I. deal, limit the terms in your contract: nothing worldwide, nothing perpetual, nothing irrevocable, and name the uses you’re allowing rather than the ones you aren’t. Keep it relatively classy, like A.I. audiobook narration, which is a huge business. Then go build yourself a terrific home to go with this terrific new phase of your life.
I’m the creative director of a fashion house, and I want our next couture collection to be an homage to a famous painter. Nothing has happened yet—no contract, no fee, not so much as a phone call to her studio. Before I make that call, I want to know what I’m signing up for. How involved does she have to be? Do I have to show her the fabrics? The tailoring? Do I have to invite her to the fittings? What should the contract actually say?
The worlds of fashion and art seem to be drawing closer and closer together every day. If you put a drawing by KAWS on a Uniqlo T-shirt, you might even start a literal riot.
Let me spare you suspense: nearly everything you’re asking will be governed by the contract you haven’t drawn up yet, so the real question is what goes in it. I say this as a representative of an organization that brokers exactly these deals. At ARS, our contracts involve the artist at every stage—fabrics, tailoring, marketing, all of it. That may sound like a burden, but it avoids any unwelcome surprises. The best collaborations are the ones both parties are genuinely excited about.
Before you draw up the contract, consider exactly what kind of collaboration you want. The most straightforward arrangement is the license, where the image of an artwork is reproduced on or adapted for the garment. Early examples include Yves Saint Laurent printing Mondrian’s primary-color grids on shift dresses in the 1960s and Halston adapting Warhol’s “Flowers” series for silk evening dresses in the ‘70s. There’s much flexibility here, so long as you bring the artist into the project on some level.
Don’t make the mistake of some of your forebears. Just because street art feels public and anonymous doesn’t mean you can appropriate images without permission. Past offenders here include Roberto Cavalli, Vivienne Westwood, and Jeremy Scott for Moschino, who was sued by Rime (aka Joseph Tierney) for using his imagery on a dress that Katy Perry wore to the 2015 Met Gala. When Guess incorporated Banksy’s graffiti into its designs, he posted a photo of their storefront, encouraging shoplifting with the caption: “They’ve helped themselves to my artwork without asking, how can it be wrong for you to do the same to their clothes?”
But let’s put aside these Goofuses to turn to a Gallant: Jonathan Anderson. Last year, he worked with the textile artist Sheila Hicks to produce a new version of the Lady Dior handbag. In this year’s fall/winter couture collection, he paid tribute to the sculptor Lynda Benglis—particularly her pleated, twisted, knotted metal sculptures, an aesthetic that lent itself perfectly to the manipulation of fabric. He brought Benglis into the project, got her sign-off on various elements, and paid her a fee, much the way you want to work with your painter.
As for how involved your painter has to be, it’s as involved as the two of you agree in the contract. The agreements that work best—the ones we broker at ARS—give the artist review of the products and the marketing at every stage, precisely because an artist who is consulted throughout is an artist who is proud of the result, supports it publicly, and makes the whole collection more successful.
As a guitarist, I’ve always struggled to write lyrics, so I was very pleased to start fooling around with Google’s A.I. song generator Lyria. Recently, however, I learned that Lyria was being sued by a group of indie musicians for ripping off their work. How do I know if my music, which is available on YouTube and SoundCloud, has been exploited by A.I. models, too?
Through its ownership of YouTube, Google has long been flagging or silencing videos that embed copyrighted music without a proper license. This was never out of the goodness of their heart: Since 2020, the Recording Industry Association of America has been hitting YouTube and Twitch with all kinds of legal notices flagging unlicensed music. Sorry, DRblood420, your Call of Duty highlights reel set to DMX is not considered transformative.
Now, with their A.I. song generator Lyria, Google is being accused of plagiarizing the work of musicians. Based on text, image, or video prompts, Lyria is able to generate songs of the user’s desired musical style and lyrical content. In March, less than a month after the launch of Lyria 3, a group of independent musicians brought a federal lawsuit against Google in Illinois, accusing the song generator of illegally ingesting their copyrighted songs published on YouTube. The complaint points to Google’s own published research, including a 2022 paper describing roughly 44 million 30-second clips pulled from some 50 million music videos. This lawsuit consists of largely the same group of plaintiffs that previously sued three other A.I. song generators: Suno, Udio, and Mureka.
The tech firms claim that training their models on copyrighted songs is “fair use” since the output is sufficiently transformative and not a direct replication. These arguments have not been fully tested or answered in American courts. Suno settled with Warner Music Group, while Udio settled with Warner and Universal, striking licensing deals that compensate copyright holders and keep A.I.-generated songs within a “walled garden,” meaning the output may not be distributed outside the platform. Universal and Sony are still litigating against Suno in Massachusetts, while last month Sony filed a second suit against Udio in the Southern District of New York naming more than 30,000 recordings. No American court is expected to rule on whether any of this was fair use before 2027.
Court battles over A.I. and music rights have also heated up in Europe. The German performing rights body GEMA—which represents over two million copyright owners globally, and stands for something very long and very German—just won a major decision in Munich against Suno that rejected its fair use arguments. This marks the first European ruling on a generative music tool, and a victory for those of us who care about music.
You asked how you could tell if your own music has been scraped for this kind of technology. That question just got more complicated. In June, Google moved to dismiss the Illinois case on the grounds that the plaintiffs can’t identify whether their songs were used—and that they had licensed the music to YouTube themselves when they uploaded it anyway. If that second argument wins, the answer to your question is moot. So consider yourself absorbed into the Google omniscience, and watch that case.
This development deliberately separates Google from Suno and Udio, who leaned on arguments of transformative fair use. If you wish to investigate the other cases further and seek compensation, you can join the class action suit against Suno and Udio by filling out this online form. The Atlantic has also just published a database of four giant datasets of songs that are being shared within the A.I.-development community. One has 12 million tracks. Another has nine million. You can search for yourself on that here. Good luck.
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