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unanimous bipartisan support
webRelevant as an early concrete example of US state-level AI governance targeting a specific harm (voice cloning), illustrating how creative industry stakeholders are shaping AI deployment policy through legislation rather than federal action.
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Summary
Tennessee enacted the ELVIS Act (Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security) on March 21, 2024, becoming the first state to legally prohibit unauthorized AI replication of musicians' voices. The law, effective July 1, 2024, allows creators to sue for damages if their voice is replicated without consent. ASCAP frames this as a model for balancing AI innovation with creator rights.
Key Points
- •Tennessee became the first US state to ban unauthorized AI voice replication of music creators, with the ELVIS Act effective July 1, 2024.
- •Creators can sue for damages if their voice is replicated by AI without consent, establishing a legal remedy for a new form of IP infringement.
- •ASCAP's six AI principles (consent, compensation, credit, transparency, human-first, global consistency) guided advocacy for the legislation.
- •The law addresses generative AI tools trained on human-created music that can produce outputs competing with or displacing original creators.
- •The act received unanimous bipartisan legislative support, signaling broad political consensus on AI voice protection at the state level.
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| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| US State AI Legislation Landscape | Analysis | 70.0 |
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# ELVIS Act Signed Into Law in Tennessee to Protect Music Creators from AI Impersonation
## March 28, 2024
On March 21, 2024, Tennessee became the first state to enact a law that protects musicians’ voices from unauthorized impersonation by artificial intelligence (AI).
Commenting on [The Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security (ELVIS) Act signing](https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-ai-music-songwriting-tennessee-eb95c850f13fd78f9e65abce2ee45091), ASCAP CEO Elizabeth Matthews said: "The ELVIS Act is about balancing the very real concerns that artificial intelligence raises for music creators while making room for responsible innovation. ASCAP applauds Tennessee lawmakers for their leadership in passing this important legislation into law.”
When the ELVIS Act goes into effect on July 1, 2024, it will be illegal in Tennessee to replicate a creator’s voice without his or her consent and creators will be able to sue for damages if their voice is replicated without authorization.
The ELVIS Act adds new protections for ASCAP music creators, and we’re proud to stand with the ASCAP members who tirelessly advocated for this law, including Matthew West, Michael W. Smith, Jamie Moore, and Chrissy Metz.
Like other technological advances in the music industry, generative AI has the potential to enhance the scope of musical creativity by supporting the creation of original music by humans. However, generative AI tools introduce a significant new risk: trained on immense datasets of original human-created musical compositions, these tools are able to generate new machine-made outputs that will compete with, and potentially displace, the human music creators whose compositions were used to train the AI tools.
As the only performing rights organization (PRO) in the U.S. operating on a not-for-profit basis, ASCAP puts music creators first and has helped our members navigate a rapidly changing music landscape for over a century.
The ELVIS Act aligns with [ASCAP’s AI Principles](https://www.ascap.com/music-creators/artificial-intelligence) – six key, creator-centric principles guiding ASCAP’s response to AI that were unanimously adopted by the ASCAP Board of Directors in 2023. These principles are:
1. **Human Creators First:** Prioritizing rights and compensation for human creativity
2. **Consent:** Protecting the right to decide whether one’s work is included in an AI training license
3. **Compensation:** Making sure creators are paid fairly when their work is used in ANY way by AI, which is best accomplished in a free market, NOT with government-mandated licensing that essentially eliminates consent
4. **Credit when creators’ works are used in new AI-generated music**
5. **Transparency in identifying AI vs. human-generated works and retaining metadata**
6. **Global Consistency:** An even playing field that values intellectual property across the global music and data ecosystem
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