Senator Marsha Blackburn
In the decades ahead, artificial intelligence has the potential to transform Americans’ lives for the better. From advanced manufacturing and health care to agriculture and finance, this emerging technology is improving efficiency, increasing productivity, and aiding innovation.
As AI develops and relies on more and more data, however, it is imperative that Congress provide guardrails to protect Americans’ intellectual property.
These protections are especially important for one of Tennessee’s most cherished institutions: our creative community, including the thousands of recording artists, songwriters, and musicians who call our state home.
For the music industry, AI provides both opportunities and challenges.
On the one hand, AI can open the door to new creative avenues for musicians. For example, after losing the ability to sing following a near-fatal stroke, country music icon Randy Travis last year released his first new track in a decade using an AI replication of his voice.
This same technology, however, can threaten the livelihood of artists when bad actors use AI to create new songs using their voices without their consent.
This issue garnered national attention in 2023 when the song “Heart on My Sleeve” went viral on streaming services like Spotify and YouTube, featuring vocal performances from pop stars Drake and The Weeknd. Neither artist, however, was involved in the production of the AI-generated song, which racked up hundreds of thousands of streams.
While creating new songs, individuals have also used AI to create fake cover songs without the permission of either the original recording artist or the artist whose voice is replicated. Last year, AI-generated songs that featured Miley Cyrus performing Beyonce’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages” tallied more than one million views. In March, Celine Dion warned her fans that a viral, AI-generated cover of the gospel song “Heal Me Lord” that used her voice was fake and created without her permission.
These digital replicas not only violate artists’ right to their voice and likeness, but they also deprive them of the compensation they deserve.
According to one recent study, AI could cut artists’ incomes by a quarter within the next four years, translating to millions of dollars in lost compensation. In one case alone, a man in North Carolina stole $10 million in royalties from artists and songwriters using AI-generated songs between 2017 and 2024.
Left unchecked, this threat would be catastrophic for the U.S. music industry, which does so much to promote American culture while supporting more than 2.5 million jobs.
To protect our creative community, I recently joined Senators Coons, Tillis, and Klobuchar in reintroducing the bipartisan NO FAKES Act, which would protect all Americans from having their voice used in AI-generated content without their consent. Specifically, this legislation would hold individuals and companies legally liable if they distribute or host an unauthorized digital replica of an individual’s voice or visual likeness.
This legislation would protect artists while safeguarding creative uses for AI, which is why it has received endorsements from a wide range of stakeholders, including record labels, streaming platforms, AI companies, and musical artists.
Just last week, Tennessee’s Martina McBride, a multi-platinum country music singer-songwriter, called on Congress to pass the NO FAKES Act during a hearing for the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law.
“The NO FAKES Act would give each of us the ability to say when and how AI deepfakes of our voices and likenesses can be used,” McBride told the committee, which I chair. “It gives every person the power to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ about how their most personal human attributes are used.”
McBride is right—and it’s why every member of Congress should support this vital legislation.
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Senator Blackburn,
Your recognition of the impact artificial intelligence may have on our music artists, as well as society at large is timely. AI is developing at a pace that is nearly impossible to comprehend and is already changing our daily lives.
However, I was struck by a glaring omission. You failed to mention that the so-called "Big Beautiful Bill", backed President Trump and supported by your party, would explicitly prevent states from enacting their own AI regulations for the next 10 years.
This is not a small detail. This sweeping act, hidden in bill that is over 1,000 pages long, strips states of their power to respond to rapidly evolving AI risks—whether related to privacy, discrimination, job displacement, deepfakes, or autonomous weapons. By locking out state legislatures for a full decade, this bill assumes that a one-size-fits-all federal approach will be enough. History tells us otherwise.
States have often been at the forefront of technological consumer protections. California’s landmark data privacy laws, for example, helped push national conversations forward. Preventing states from acting means delaying much-needed oversight until after damage has already been done. It is extremely important that we protect state’s ability to regulate a powerful and potentially dangerous technology.
It is curious to me that a party that for so long has heralded the importance of state’s rights is suddenly changing its tune when it comes to the governance of AI. With a little digging, I think I may have discovered why President Trump and the GOP is attempting to pass this protection for AI driven companies.
Amazon, Meta, Google, and OpenAI have a couple of things in common: for one, they are all major players in the AI space and would benefit from less regulation. Another commonality? They all gave at least $1 million each to Trump’s inaugural committee. When policies don’t make sense, simply follow the money.
If we’re serious about AI accountability, we need both strong federal leadership and the ability for states to act when federal agencies lag behind. AI is moving fast. A 10-year regulatory freeze at the state level is not responsible governance.
It’s not only a gamble with music and the arts, but also public safety, civil rights, and economic fairness. I hope you will partner with your GOP colleagues to stop this dangerous federal overreach and commit to truly responsible, adaptive AI policy.
Walker Rhodes