In April 2023, vocal deepfakes went viral as the song “Heart on My Sleeve” garnered millions of hits across popular music platforms. Unbeknownst to listeners, however, the voices of Drake and The Weeknd were entirely AI-generated, complete with an unauthorized producer tag from Metro Boomin. The song was live for two weeks before Universal Music Group (“UMG”) took it down via a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) takedown.
While UMG may have won the battle, the war with artificial intelligence (“AI”) and vocal cloning continues. Towards the end of 2024, numerous public and private stakeholders weighed in on the issue, discussing the pros and cons of national protections against the use of AI. By the end of the year, the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act (the “NO FAKES Act”)—intended to protect “rights in the voice and visual likeness of individuals”—garnered considerable bipartisan support. If the law had passed, it would have provided a national framework to protect individuals and provide tools to effectively fight back against digital deepfakes. But by the end of the year, the proposed bill failed to receive final legislative approval.
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"The Clone Wars: A New Congress Reconsiders the NO FAKES Act to Combat Digital Deepfakes," by Jeffrey N. Rosenthal and Timothy J. Miller was published in The Temple 10-Q, Temple’s Business Law Magazine, on April 29, 2025.
