Do Actors Have Legal Protection Against Unauthorized AI Use of Their Likeness?

Two Layers of Current Protection

Actors concerned about unauthorized AI use of their likeness currently have two overlapping, though incomplete, layers of protection. The first is longstanding right-of-publicity law, which exists at the state level in the U.S. and generally protects a person’s name, image, and likeness from unauthorized commercial exploitation. These laws predate generative AI but can, in principle, extend to cover unauthorized AI-generated recreations of a person’s appearance or voice, depending on how a given state’s law is written and interpreted by courts.

The second, newer layer comes from industry labor agreements. Following recent negotiations, unions representing film and television performers secured contractual requirements obligating studios to obtain informed consent and provide compensation before creating or using a digital replica of a covered performer. This gives union actors a more specific, negotiated form of protection tailored directly to AI and digital replica technology, layered on top of whatever general right-of-publicity protections already existed in their state.

Why These Protections Are Still Incomplete

Neither layer offers comprehensive, uniform protection on its own. Right-of-publicity laws vary significantly from state to state in both scope and strength, meaning an actor’s practical legal protection can depend heavily on where they live, where a dispute is filed, or which state’s law a court determines applies. Contractual protections from union agreements, meanwhile, only bind studios and productions that are actual parties to those agreements, and only benefit performers covered by the relevant union contract — leaving non-union performers and general members of the public reliant primarily on the more variable state-law protections instead.

There is also, as of now, no single comprehensive federal law in the U.S. specifically and uniformly addressing unauthorized AI-generated likeness or voice replicas, though this has become an active area of legislative attention, with some states introducing or passing more targeted legislation addressing AI-specific likeness and voice misuse.

What This Means in Practice

A well-known union actor working on a major studio production benefits from both a relatively strong contractual consent-and-compensation requirement and whatever right-of-publicity protection their state provides. A non-union performer, or an ordinary private individual whose likeness is used in an AI-generated video without consent, must rely more heavily on general right-of-publicity or emerging state-specific AI likeness laws, which can offer meaningfully less certainty or recourse depending on where they live.

Bottom Line

Actors currently have real but incomplete legal protection against unauthorized AI use of their likeness, combining variable state right-of-publicity laws with newer contractual protections from union labor agreements — a patchwork that leaves gaps, particularly for non-union performers, as broader legislation in this area continues to develop.

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