Dana Rao, the Executive Vice President of Adobe spoke before a Senate Judiciary Committee on the topics of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Copyright law.

Speaking to the committee, Mr. Rao urged that there should be legislation to penalize end users who intentionally try and recreate a specific artist’s style or impersonate them.

You can see his most relevant statement below at timestamp 25:23:

“We believe artists should be protected against this type of economic harm; and we propose Congress establish a new federal anti-impersonation right that would give artists a right to enforce against someone intentionally attempting to impersonate their style or likeness.

Holding people accountable who misuse AI tools is a solution we believe goes to the heart of some of the issues our customers have; and this new right would help address that concern.

The United States has led the world through technological transformations in the past, and we’ve all learned it is important to be proactively responsible about the impact of these technologies.

Pairing innovation with ‘responsible innovation’ will ensure that AI ultimately becomes a transformative and true benefit to our society.”

Currently, many AI generators use data from thousands of artists who have unknowingly consented to data scraping via the “opt-in by default” nature of websites like DeviantArt.

Some models may not even consider the artist’s consent when using their work as training data. This has led some artists to fear this type of “impersonation” as a direct threat to their livelihood.

It remains to be seen how far such a “right” would go for artists, and currently artist names are used in prompts to steer training data to a more consistent style. Could this change in the near future?

The future of AI and copyright law remains unclear, recently gaming giant Valve has refrained from approving games with AI assets on Steam until the matter is officially settled.