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New York’s Digital Replica Law and its Impact on Artificial Intelligence and the Entertainment Industry | Littler


New York Senate Invoice 7676B regulates contracts for the creation and use of digital replicas. This regulation took impact on January 1, 2025. The regulation defines “digital duplicate” as “a digital simulation of the voice or likeness of a person” which, to a mean particular person, “so carefully resembles” the voice or likeness of the particular person such that the likeness is just about indistinguishable from the “genuine” model. N.Y. Gen. Oblig. Law § 5-302(2).

Particularly, the regulation voids any contract for the creation and use of a digital replication of the efficiency of a person which “meets all of the following circumstances”: (1) permits for the “creation and use of a digital duplicate” of a person’s voice or likeness “instead of work the particular person would in any other case have carried out in particular person”; (2) doesn’t embody a “fairly particular description of the meant use of the digital duplicate”; and (3) was negotiated with a person who was not represented by authorized counsel or a labor union. See N.Y. Gen. Oblig. Law § 5-302(1)(C). In different phrases, contracts that undergo from two or fewer of those circumstances will not be voided beneath this regulation.

New York’s digital duplicate regulation regulates dangers related to AI, which unions have tried to handle already via collective bargaining, a course of the place a union negotiates with employers on behalf of its members with respect to phrases and circumstances of employment. Lately, many unions that symbolize performers in the leisure business, similar to SAG-AFTRA, have expressed considerations that AI-generated replicas of performers might substitute the performers themselves. In truth, SAG-AFTRA has instituted guiding ideas1 for the use of AI, which give for, amongst different issues:

  • A performer’s proper to consent to or prohibit the creation of a digital duplicate
  • A performer’s proper to barter limitations on the makes use of of a digital duplicate
  • Secure storage and safety of digital replications of a performer’s voice, likeness and efficiency
  • Applicable compensation for the use of AI content material

SAG-AFTRA, which represents roughly 160,000 actors, dancers, singers, and different media professionals throughout the nation, addressed the use of AI in its most up-to-date settlement with Hollywood studios, which was ratified by its members on December 5, 2023. The memorandum of settlement, in impact from November 9, 2023 via June 30, 2026, modifies the present collective bargaining settlement and requires that AI-generated likenesses or performances of SAG-AFTRA members are topic to sure limitations, and provides the union the proper to satisfy twice a 12 months with every studio to debate the studio’s plans to make use of AI.2

Whereas New York’s new digital duplicate regulation is the first of its variety in the state, it raises the chance that the state might flip to regulating the use of AI in different industries affecting quite a lot of staff. For instance, the phrase “digital duplicate” additionally seems in the lately enacted New York State Fashion Workers Act, which defines the time period as a computer-generated or enhanced illustration of a mannequin’s likeness.

Footnotes

1 See usually, SAG-AFTRA Contracts & Industry Assets, Artificial Intelligence, https://www.sagaftra.org/contracts-industry-resources/member-resources/artificial-intelligence.

2 See usually SAG-AFTRA, TV/Theatrical Contracts 2023: Abstract of Tentative Settlement (Nov. 16, 2023), https://www.sagaftra.org/files/sa_documents/TV-Theatrical_23_Summary_Agreement_Final.pdf.



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