SAG-AFTRA’s open letter campaign has drawn signatures from actors, students, parents, and everyday people — not just union members. Voices are being cloned in scam calls. Faces are selling supplements without consent. Fabricated videos put words in mouths that were never opened. That’s not a Black Mirror premise anymore — it’s a regular Thursday on the internet, with platforms secretly tracking users and exploiting consent at every turn. More than 16,000 people have signed SAG-AFTRA’s open letter demanding Congress pass the NO FAKES Act, a bipartisan bill that would give every American a federal right to control their own voice and likeness. The signatories aren’t just actors. Students signed. Parents signed. People with zero Hollywood connections signed. The threat, clearly, has escaped the studio lot.
What the NO FAKES Act Actually Does
The bill creates a federal IP right over your digital identity and hands you the legal tools to enforce it.
The Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act would:
- Create a federal intellectual property right in every person’s voice and likeness, including post-mortem protections for families
- Let individuals sue anyone who knowingly creates, distributes, or profits from unauthorized AI-generated replicas
- Hold platforms liable for hosting unauthorized replicas when they have knowledge — while protecting those that act quickly on takedowns
- Carve out exemptions for news, satire, commentary, and transformative uses
- Go significantly broader than the recently passed Take It Down Act, which only covers non-consensual intimate imagery
The coalition backing this bill reads like a glitch in the matrix. OpenAI, YouTube, IBM, the AFL-CIO, the Motion Picture Association, the RIAA, and the Recording Academy — all on the same side. Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s national executive director, put it plainly: “Rarely does legislation earn this kind of cross-sector support.” The bill, sponsored by senators from both parties — including Marsha Blackburn, Chris Coons, Thom Tillis, and Amy Klobuchar, with House sponsors Maria Salazar and Madeleine Dean — is now before the Senate Judiciary Committee, further along than the previous version that stalled.
“Unchecked AI can ruin lives.” — SAG-AFTRA president Sean Astin
Where Digital Rights Groups Draw the Line
Not every advocate is cheering — and their objections reveal real tension in the bill’s current draft.
Not everyone is on board. Public Knowledge has published a formal call for “significant overhaul,” warning that a strong, transferable IP right in identity could suppress satire, biopics, or remix culture — speech traditionally protected under the First Amendment. The bill’s built-in exemptions attempt to thread that needle. Critics argue the current draft doesn’t thread it cleanly enough.
If this passes, the U.S. becomes the global reference point for handling AI identity theft. If it stalls again, expect a messy state-by-state patchwork while deepfake exploitation keeps running unchecked — a pattern familiar from other tech scandals where accountability arrived too late. Your voice and face are either a protected right or fair game. Congress gets to pick.
