A friend of mine sells real estate, and last spring she recorded a short video for her website. Nothing fancy. Thirty seconds of her smiling, talking about the neighborhood she grew up in. A few months later, that same face and that same voice were pitching a crypto scheme on a platform she had never heard of. She did not record it. She did not approve it. She did not even know it existed until a former client called to ask, half joking, if she had switched careers.
I think about her a lot. What happened to her used to be something that only happened to famous people. Now it happens to anyone with a phone and a face, which is to say, all of us. Researchers have started calling this the indistinguishable threshold, the point where a few seconds of audio is enough to clone a voice so well that your own mother could not tell the difference.
So when I read that Congress reintroduced the NO FAKES Act on May 20, I felt something I do not usually feel when I read about a bill. I felt hopeful.
The NO FAKES Act, which stands for Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe, is a federal bill that would give every one of us the right to authorize the use of our own voice and likeness in a digital replica. Put simply, your face and your voice would become something you legally own, and using an AI version of them without your permission would become something you could fight in court.
A few details stood out to me. The right does not die when you do. It can be passed to your heirs and licensed by your estate, with that post-mortem protection lasting up to 70 years after a person's death. The revised version introduced this month also adds a counter-notice process so people can challenge takedowns they think are unfair, plus carve-outs for libraries, archives, and research, on top of the existing exceptions for news, documentary, sports, biography, commentary, criticism, and parody.
What gives me real optimism is who is standing behind it. This is not a one-party project. The sponsors include Senators Marsha Blackburn, Chris Coons, Thom Tillis, and Amy Klobuchar, along with Representatives Maria Salazar and Madeleine Dean. An earlier version drew support from performers, studios, and even tech giants like YouTube, Amazon, and OpenAI. When companies that build this technology and the artists who fear it are asking for the same guardrails, that tells me the problem is real and the moment is serious.
If you want to understand why, remember the song Heart on My Sleeve. Back in 2023 it went viral using AI versions of Drake and The Weeknd, neither of whom had anything to do with it. It was eventually pulled from streaming services, but the genie was already out, humming a tune nobody asked for.
A right is only as strong as your ability to use it. And that is where my hope meets a hard truth I have learned more than once in my life, usually the slow way.
I spent years as a caregiver, and one thing that season taught me is that having a legal right on paper means very little if you do not know when something has gone wrong, and you have no plan for what to do next. You can have the best insurance policy in the world, but if you find out about the problem too late, the paperwork does not save you. It just documents the loss.
The NO FAKES Act, if it passes, gives you a door you can walk through. It does not put a smoke detector in the building. My real estate friend still found out from a phone call, weeks after the fake was already working its way through people who trusted her. The law could have helped her sue. It would not have told her the fake existed in the first place.
That gap between your rights and your awareness is the whole reason I do this work. Legislation is the ceiling we are slowly building over our heads, and I am grateful for the people building it. But you still need a floor under your feet today, while the bill sits in committee and the technology keeps getting faster and cheaper and more convincing.
So I am choosing to hold both things at once. I am genuinely encouraged that lawmakers from both parties are treating your face as something worth protecting in writing. And I am also clear-eyed that protection you cannot see coming is not really protection yet. The good news is you do not have to wait for Washington to start paying attention to your own digital identity.
If you are not sure how exposed you are right now, you can take our free 2-minute Deepfake Risk Assessment. It will not pass a law for you. But it will tell you where you stand, and that is a better place to start than a phone call from a confused client.