Take Action: Stop Little Mermaid Bills from Stealing Artists’ Voices!
Big Content monopolies are pushing new AI regulations that they say will protect us from deepfakes. In reality, bills like NO FAKES and No AI FRAUD will steal artists’ agency and their creative voice—like Ursula in the Little Mermaid.
These bills set out to create a new intellectual property right. But this so-called right doesn’t protect artists—in fact, quite the opposite. If these bills pass, media & content companies will issue contracts that could force anyone to sign away their appearance and voice, with no way to get it back or control how it is used for a decade or longer. Trade associations and content monopolies are pushing these bills because they crave total control over artists and their creative work.
Signing these rights away would mean that not only artists, but any vulnerable low-income person could lose any control of what happens on the Internet with their body, their face, their voice—or all three. They wouldn’t have a say in how the corporation that bought those rights uses AI to digitally manipulate their likenesses. Instead of protecting people from deepfakes, this would give corporations a deepfake superpower they can license out to literally anyone.
Contact your representatives now to urge them to stop these Little Mermaid Bills from moving forward, and give people real protection from deepfakes!
Creator control, not corporate control.
We’ve already seen how corporate control of artists’ rights has worked out for artists like Prince or Taylor Swift. Prince had to change his name and compared his contracts to slavery, and a man who’s been terrible to Taylor Swift owns her songs and, in her “worst case scenario,” won’t let her buy them back. Now imagine a rising star whose AI likeness endorses a presidential candidate they hate—but even as their endorsement is plastered across the Internet and news media, they could be forbidden by NDAs, noncompetes, brand protection agreements, or other shady machinations from contradicting it.
That’s what these Little Mermaid bills are designed to do. They’ve been shaped by corporations looking for a legal way to have “perfect” AI artists that they can exploit while discarding the human being entirely. If someone signs one of these contracts, no true love’s kiss will be able to free their voice, face, or likeness from the Ursula’s-seashell-contracts of trade associations or other big content rightsholders. We have to stop bad AI bills before it’s too late and we all become Big Content’s poor unfortunate souls.