State Privacy Laws Poised To Fight Unauthorized Voice Cloning

*This article was originally published in Bloomberg Law on July 16, 2024.

Unauthorized voice cloning using generative artificial intelligence is a growing concern. But state privacy laws have potential to help fight voice cloning.

Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act is a good vehicle to examine this potential. It provides a private right of action that has caused a significant body of relevant case law to be developed. While BIPA case law doesn't explicitly address voice cloning, it illustrates two principles that would be relevant to any attempt to use biometric protection to stop voice cloning.

First, BIPA case law shows that using AI to generate a voice with the same characteristics as the data subjects' is actionable only if those characteristics are specific enough to identify the data subject. This is demonstrated by Carpenter v. McDonald's Corp., in which the judge found that characteristics extracted from voice recordings using AI weren't a