A big part of the Wild West (with less water) vibes surrounding Earth’s current AI bubble has come from the way governments have been trying to keep the hell out of the whole thing, at least until the dust has settled. Although the EU passed laws last year setting up a framework for regulating artificial intelligence use, American lawmakers have been way more reticent, with legislators looking nervously to the Supreme Court, which has yet to hand down any truly definitive rulings on any of the thousand or so issues pertaining to copyright, fair use, outright theft, dead people’s faces being used as digital puppets, etc., that crop up around this technology.
Now, New York has taken a step toward being one of the first states in the nation to attempt at least a bit of regulation on the topic, with Governor Kathy Hochul signing a pair of bills on Thursday designed to bring some small measure of accountability to companies using AI to generate video content. One focuses specifically on ads—sorry, McDonald’s—which will force any commercial featuring “AI-generated synthetic performers” to be accompanied by a disclosure. A second law focuses on using famous people’s virtual corpses to shill products or pop up in films: It “requires consent from heirs or executors if a person wants to use the name, image, or likeness of an individual for commercial purposes after their death.”
Neither of these laws feel particularly sweeping or ground-breaking, if we’re being honest; there are already statutes on the books about likeness rights, and asking companies to run a tiny disclaimer if they want to generate up some homunculi to fill out the back of a Starbucks feels like a pretty tiny ask. But they do represent a state government stating, definitively, that it can regulate this stuff, something the federal government has so far notably declined to do. It was a big enough deal that Hochul announced the signings from the offices of acting union SAG, where she was accompanied by negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland and former union president Fran Drescher—both major figures in the 2023 strikes that saw the union battle, not wholly successfully, to get AI guidelines into its contract with studios. Alluding briefly to today’s Disney/OpenAI news, Hochul noted that regulations weren’t intended to curtail innovation: “We do want to embrace innovation. We really do. It’s who we are as New Yorkers. It’s what makes us so fabulous and so great. But not to the detriment of people. That has to be the dividing line.”
[via Deadline]
