Two AI likeness laws take effect this week and creators are in scope
New York's synthetic performer disclosure rule and Washington's expanded personality rights law both go live this week, and branded content sits squarely inside them.
Two state laws aimed at AI-generated likenesses take effect this week, and if you make branded content, you are now inside their reach. New York’s synthetic performer disclosure law goes live June 9, and Washington’s expanded personality rights law follows on June 11. Both change what you can put in a video without telling anyone.
Start with New York. An amendment to General Business Law section 396-b now requires a conspicuous disclosure whenever an advertisement distributed in the state features a synthetic performer, meaning a humanlike figure generated or substantially altered by AI to look like a real person. The obligation does not sit only with the brand. Production partners are named too, which in practice means the creator or agency that built the ad. The first violation is a thousand dollars, then five thousand for each one after that. Those numbers are small enough to ignore individually and large enough to hurt across a campaign.
Then Washington. Senate Bill 5886 widens the state’s personality rights law to cover what it calls a forged digital likeness, any AI-created or altered audio or video that convincingly mimics a real person. The new version raises the penalties, lets courts order immediate injunctions, and allows recovery for reputational harm and emotional distress, not just lost licensing fees. That last part matters. Until now the practical problem with suing over a fake of yourself was proving you lost money. Washington just removed that hurdle for people who live there.
Here is what this changes in your actual workflow. If you generate a spokesperson, a voice, or a face with AI and the spot runs in New York, you need disclosure language in the ad itself, not buried in a caption or a terms page. Treat it the way you already treat paid-partnership tags: visible, plain, and on the asset. If you license your own likeness to a brand, your contract should now say what the brand can and cannot generate from your face and voice, because the default assumption that they only use the footage you shot is no longer safe. And if someone makes an AI version of you without permission, Washington and a growing list of states finally give you a claim that does not depend on showing a lost deal.
The harder shift is conceptual. For years the creator economy treated likeness as something you protected through platform takedowns and goodwill. These laws move it into property and consumer-protection territory, where the questions are consent, disclosure, and statutory damages. That is more durable footing, but it cuts both ways. The same rules that protect you from an unauthorized replica also govern the synthetic performers you put in your own work.
This quarter, do one concrete thing. Pull your last three brand deals and check whether any used AI-generated or AI-altered people. If so, add a disclosure standard to your production checklist and a likeness clause to your template agreement. Both take an afternoon now and save a dispute later.