Tennessee’s Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act of 2024 - the ELVIS Act, a nod to Elvis Presley and the state’s music industry - was signed into law on March 21, 2024 and took effect July 1, 2024. Passed as House Bill 2091 and Senate Bill 2096, it amended Tennessee’s existing right-of-publicity law to address AI voice cloning and audio deepfakes, and is widely described as the first US statute to single out AI-generated voice impersonation.
The bill’s core change was to add voice to the list of protected attributes and define it broadly. It provides that “Every individual has a property right in the use of that individual’s name, photograph, voice, or likeness in any medium in any manner,” and defines “voice” as “a sound in a medium that is readily identifiable and attributable to a particular individual, regardless of whether the sound contains the actual voice or a simulation of the voice of the individual” - language aimed squarely at synthetic voices that imitate a real person.
The provision most relevant to AI tools makes a person “liable to a civil action if the person distributes, transmits, or otherwise makes available an algorithm, software, tool, or other technology, service, or device, the primary purpose or function of which is the production of an individual’s photograph, voice, or likeness without authorization.” It also extends standing to record labels and distributors holding exclusive rights to an artist’s recordings, and preserves First Amendment protections.
Why business readers should care: the ELVIS Act reframed AI voice cloning as a property-rights problem and reached not just those who publish an unauthorized clone but those who distribute the cloning tools themselves. It became a template other states looked to as AI voice synthesis matured, and it sat alongside disputes such as the sky-voice-scarlett-johansson controversy and the 2024-riaa-v-suno-udio music-industry lawsuits in defining how the law treats a synthesized human voice.