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Require consent and compensation for a real person's likeness or voice, and disclosure of synthetic commercial content, through state law and industry standards, since federal enforcement here reversed in 2025.
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AI-researched, unverifiedLast Reviewed
Jul 4, 2026
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Support state-level disclosure and detection-tool-access laws as the practical near-term mechanism, given documented federal reversal in this specific area; support a federal floor requiring consent and compensation for commercial use of a real person's digital voice or likeness, modeled on existing negotiated industry agreements and state estate-consent law; support continued content-provenance standard adoption as the primary technical disclosure mechanism while acknowledging its cross-platform limitations; require real (not nominal) platform-level provenance and quality enforcement against mass low-quality synthetic content at commercial scale; and decline to support any restriction on generative AI capability itself.
The line this issue draws throughout is between restricting the capability (which it declines to do) and requiring accountability for how the capability is deployed at scale (which it does). Volume-based harms — a marketplace or a feed degraded by mass low-effort synthetic content — are a deployment-accountability problem exactly like named-likeness misuse and undisclosed paid content, not a different category requiring a different principle. Proposal 6 is not a departure from this issue's logic; it's that logic applied to the harm mode most people encounter daily.
Primary — Inclusive Growth and Economic Development. Consent-and-compensation requirements for use of a real person's likeness or voice, and disclosure requirements that let consumers and creative markets function with accurate information, both extend this value's commitment to "policies driving economic growth" toward the individual creators currently least protected in that growth.
Secondary — Access to Information and Connectivity. "We defend online freedom of expression and user rights" supports consumers' and audiences' right to know whether content they're engaging with is synthetic, distinct from any restriction on producing that content in the first place.
Acknowledged tension. The current administration's own stated deregulatory position (the FTC's 2025 reversal) is a live, contrary reading of how "responsible innovation" should be weighed against consumer-protection disclosure. This issue takes a side (favoring disclosure) while being explicit that it runs against current federal enforcement posture, not against some abstract, uncontested position.
The FTC's December 2025 reversal on AI-fake-content enforcement happened under the current Republican-controlled Commission, consistent with the administration's broader "don't restrict AI over potential misuse" posture. Disclosure and consent protections have instead advanced through Democratic-led state action (New York's Hochul, California's Newsom) and, more tellingly, through bipartisan federal legislation: the NO FAKES Act (protecting a real person's voice and likeness from unauthorized AI replicas) was introduced by Reps. Salazar (R) and Dean (D) with Sens. Blackburn (R) and Coons (D). That shows protecting an identifiable individual's likeness specifically draws support across party lines even when general AI-content deregulation doesn't. The entertainment union angle (SAG-AFTRA) is traditionally labor/Democratic-coalition-adjacent, but the NO FAKES Act's bipartisan sponsor list shows likeness protection isn't confined to one party's coalition. The Innovation Party's delta: treat the NO FAKES-style consent-and-compensation model as the point of cross-party agreement to build from, while pushing back specifically on the FTC's broader deregulatory retreat on commercial-content disclosure.
The strongest good-faith objection: this issue's whole framework (named-individual consent, paid-content disclosure) is precisely scoped to avoid regulating generative AI's capability, but "AI slop" is a volume problem, and volume problems are exactly the kind of thing that resists precise, narrowly-targeted rules. A critic could reasonably argue that Proposal 6's "real enforcement, not nominal policy" standard is either too vague to be a policy (what specifically counts as "real"?) or, if made specific enough to be enforceable, starts to look like exactly the kind of broad content restriction this issue otherwise declines to support. This issue's answer — identity verification for commercial publishing accounts, the kind Amazon has already implemented — is a concrete answer, but a fair critic could still ask whether it scales to video platforms and open web content the same way it does to a single bookseller's marketplace. That's an implementation question, not a reason to abandon the standard: the identity-verification principle scales in the same direction regardless of platform size, even if the specific mechanics differ. "Know who's publishing at commercial scale" is achievable everywhere large aggregation happens, and working out the platform-specific mechanics is the normal, unremarkable work of implementing any enforcement standard, not evidence the standard itself is wrong.
Everyday internet users bear the diffuse, hard-to-quantify cost of a degraded information and media environment — lower trust in what they read, watch, and buy, without any single incident being severe enough to prompt individual recourse. Legitimate authors, journalists, and video creators bear a competitive cost: their effortful work competes for attention and marketplace visibility against near-zero-cost synthetic volume. Children are a specific, documented population bearing a sharper version of this cost, per the video-recommendation finding above. Larger platforms bear the direct compliance cost Proposal 6 imposes — the deliberate target, since the size threshold exists specifically to put that cost where the harm is concentrated rather than on every small platform regardless of exposure.
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