Inside the Celebrity Deepfake Boom: Sabrina Carpenter and the Modern Ai Scams
The current legal framework in the United States leaves artists like Carpenter fighting modern AI manipulation with outdated legal doctrines. Copyright law protects original creative works, sound recordings, compositions, and published photographs, but does not explicitly protect an individual’s physical appearance or natural vocal timbre.
When a scammer trains an AI model on Carpenter’s face, they rarely infringe on a single copyrighted image directly. Instead, the model absorbs the statistical patterns of her features. Rights holders must therefore fall back on a patchwork of state-level "Right of Publicity" statutes. While states like California and Tennessee offer robust identity protections, most notably Tennessee’s ELVIS Act, which explicitly shields an artist’s voice from unauthorized algorithmic duplication, other jurisdictions offer almost no statutory recourse.
Federal legislative proposals, including the bipartisan NO FAKES Act, seek to establish a uniform federal right over an individual’s voice and visual likeness. Under this framework, unauthorized generative replicas would carry severe statutory damages, and digital hosting services would face direct financial liability if they fail to remove verified synthetic clones within a mandatory window. Silicon Valley lobbying groups and open-source advocates, however, continue to push back, arguing that overly broad definitions could chill legitimate parody, satire, and creative fair use.
