The ELVIS Act is a Tennessee law, signed by Governor Bill Lee on March 21, 2024, and effective July 1, 2024, that protects individuals from the unauthorized use of their name, photograph, voice, or likeness, with a specific focus on AI-generated content. Its full name is the Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act of 2024, and it was the first state law in the country written to address AI voice cloning and digital replicas of real people.1Tennessee Secretary of State. Public Chapter No. 588 – Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act of 2024 It updates Tennessee’s Personal Rights Protection Act of 1984, which had covered name, photograph, and likeness but said nothing about voice — a gap that mattered once a few seconds of audio could be used to train a convincing vocal clone.
What the Law Protects
Under the ELVIS Act, every individual has a property right in four aspects of their identity: name, photograph, voice, and likeness. Those rights are exclusive to the individual and anyone they authorize.
The definition of “voice” is where the statute breaks new ground. It means any sound in a medium that is readily identifiable and attributable to a particular individual, whether the sound is the person’s actual voice or a computer-generated simulation of it.1Tennessee Secretary of State. Public Chapter No. 588 – Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act of 2024 You do not have to prove someone captured and replayed your actual voice. If an AI tool generates audio that sounds like you and is identifiable as you, that falls within the law.
Who Is Covered
The ELVIS Act protects both living and deceased individuals. A living person can sue directly. A parent or legal guardian can enforce a minor’s rights. When someone dies, the rights pass to their estate, executor, heirs, or anyone the individual assigned them to.1Tennessee Secretary of State. Public Chapter No. 588 – Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act of 2024
Protection lasts for the individual’s lifetime and continues for at least ten years after death. After that ten-year window, the rights can last indefinitely so long as someone keeps commercially exploiting them. If no one uses the deceased person’s name, photograph, voice, or likeness commercially for two consecutive years after the initial ten-year period, the exclusive rights expire. The statute treats the ongoing commercial availability of a sound recording or audiovisual work as a qualifying use, so an artist whose catalog remains on streaming platforms keeps satisfying that requirement.1Tennessee Secretary of State. Public Chapter No. 588 – Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act of 2024
The law also gives record labels a seat at the enforcement table. A company holding an exclusive personal services contract with a recording artist, or an exclusive license to distribute sound recordings of that artist’s performances, can bring an action to enforce the artist’s rights. The artist can still sue independently.2Justia Law. Tennessee Code 47-25-1106 – Remedies
What the Law Prohibits
The ELVIS Act reaches three categories of conduct, and knowledge is a required element for each. Accidental or unknowing use does not trigger liability.
The first category is traditional unauthorized commercial use: knowingly using someone’s name, photograph, voice, or likeness for advertising, merchandise, fundraising, or solicitation without consent.1Tennessee Secretary of State. Public Chapter No. 588 – Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act of 2024
The second targets AI-generated content directly. A person is liable if they distribute, perform, or otherwise make an individual’s voice or likeness available to the public while knowing the use was not authorized. That reaches well beyond advertising and covers, for example, publishing a deepfake song that mimics a real artist’s vocals.
The third category imposes liability on anyone who distributes an algorithm, software tool, or other technology whose primary purpose is to produce a specific, identifiable individual’s photograph, voice, or likeness, knowing the individual did not authorize it.1Tennessee Secretary of State. Public Chapter No. 588 – Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act of 2024 This provision does not target general-purpose AI tools. It targets tools built or fine-tuned to replicate a particular person. A voice-cloning app trained on one artist’s recordings sits squarely inside the statute; a general text-to-speech engine likely does not.
Exemptions and First Amendment Limits
The ELVIS Act does not override the First Amendment. Uses connected to news, public affairs, or sports coverage remain exempt, but the statute narrowed that exemption compared to the 1984 version. The news exemption now applies only to uses actually protected by the First Amendment, rather than serving as a blanket pass for anything loosely tied to news.
Uses in creative and expressive works are also exempt where the use does not cross into unauthorized commercial exploitation. Advertising for a protected creative work can reference the individuals who appear in it, though the advertising-media exemption itself was tightened, reducing the automatic protection publishers and broadcasters previously enjoyed when running third-party ads. The narrower carve-outs mean claims of news or creative expression cannot be used as a backdoor for exploiting someone’s identity.
Penalties for a Violation
The ELVIS Act carries both civil and criminal consequences.
Civil Remedies
A court can order the unauthorized use to stop, authorize the seizure of materials used in the violation, impound materials while a case is pending, and order those materials destroyed as part of a final judgment. Anything confiscated under an injunction can be liquidated to satisfy damages the rights holder recovers.2Justia Law. Tennessee Code 47-25-1106 – Remedies
On the money side, the individual can recover actual damages plus any profits the violator earned from the unauthorized use that are not already reflected in the actual damages figure. Whether the violator actually profited is not a factor in liability. A defendant can be liable even if the unauthorized use made no money.2Justia Law. Tennessee Code 47-25-1106 – Remedies
One enhanced damages provision applies to a specific group. If someone knowingly uses the identity of a member of the U.S. armed forces or the Tennessee National Guard without authorization, the individual is entitled to triple damages plus reasonable attorney fees.2Justia Law. Tennessee Code 47-25-1106 – Remedies
Criminal Penalties
A violation can also be prosecuted as a misdemeanor. Under Tennessee’s misdemeanor sentencing structure, that carries potential penalties of up to 11 months and 29 days in jail and fines up to $2,500. Criminal enforcement is a layer that most right-of-publicity statutes in other states do not have.
How the ELVIS Act Fits With Other Laws
Tennessee moved first, and other states have followed with their own approaches. California clarified that its existing right-of-publicity statute covers digital replications of a person’s voice or likeness when a reasonable person would believe they are genuine. Maryland introduced legislation creating transferable rights over digital replicas of a person’s voice or visual likeness, with provisions that survive death.3National Conference of State Legislatures. Artificial Intelligence 2025 Legislation
At the federal level, the NO FAKES Act (Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act) has been introduced as a bipartisan bill that would create nationwide protections against unauthorized digital replicas, impose liability on platforms that knowingly host such content, and carve out First Amendment exceptions. The bill would largely preempt state laws on digital replicas in favor of a single national standard.4U.S. Senate. NO FAKES Act Summary As of early 2025 it had not been enacted, so the ELVIS Act remains the most specific state-level answer to AI-driven identity replication, and in Tennessee it is the law that governs.