You can strike a bad AI clause. You can't strike a deepfake.

Two of the posts on this site are about the same move: a studio hands you a stack of paperwork, somewhere in it is a clause that signs away your likeness, and the job is to catch that clause and strike it before you sign. The piece on the AI clause in your next contract and the contract red flags follow-up are both, underneath, about defense — reading a document carefully enough that you don't hand over the right to your own face.

This post is about the other half of the problem, the half a contract can't help you with at all: the likeness nobody asked you to sign for. The face swapped into a scene you never shot. The "leaked" site that's entirely generated. The nudify app that turns a clothed photo into a fake nude in about nine seconds. There's no clause to strike there, because you never signed anything. The contract was never the lever.

I'm about a year into self-producing, but I spent years before that writing and reading contracts in a different field, so the way I land on this is a property question: what right do you actually own here, and can you enforce it against someone you never met? I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice — it's an operator's read on a gap I think more of us should understand before the tools get any better than they already are.

Two problems that wear the same face

It's worth separating the two cleanly, because they need different tools.

The first is the one the contract posts cover: you license your likeness away. You sign a model agreement or a scene contract, and somewhere in it you grant rights you didn't mean to grant. That's a paperwork problem, and paperwork problems have paperwork solutions — read the definitions, strike the broad grant, get a sunset clause. Fully inside your control on the day you sign.

The second is different in kind. Someone takes your likeness with no deal at all. There was no negotiation, no contract, no shoot — a stranger fed your existing photos into a model and generated something you never made. A contract clause can't reach that person, because you have no contract with them. So the question stops being "what did I sign?" and becomes "do I own a right to my own face that I can point at, and enforce, against someone I've never met?"

That second question has a much worse answer than most people assume.

The honest answer right now: sort of, in some states

Here's where the law actually stands today, and it's a patchwork, so take this as the shape of it rather than advice for your situation — which of these covers you depends entirely on what state you're in.

The closest existing tool is the right of publicity — a state-law right to control the commercial use of your name, image, and likeness. The catch is that it's a state-by-state right: strong in a handful of states, thin or close to nonexistent in others, and mostly built for the wrong problem. It was written to stop a celebrity's face turning up in a soda ad, not to deal with a fake porn clip of a working creator. Stretching it to cover synthetic sexual content is possible in some places and a dead end in others.

Copyright only helps when your actual footage gets reused — a DMCA notice works on a stolen clip you filmed. But a wholly AI-generated fake isn't your copyrighted work; nobody copied your video, they manufactured a new one. So the DMCA, the tool creators reach for first, frequently doesn't bite on the exact thing that hurts most.

There's also a fast-growing stack of state deepfake and nonconsensual-intimate-image laws, plus some federal movement on takedowns of intimate images, and for the porn-specific case that's often the most useful lever that exists right now. But it's uneven from state to state, and it's criminal-or-takedown framing rather than a clean property right you own and can sue on.

Add it up and the honest picture is this: today you mostly rent your likeness back through a patchwork of partial tools, depending on where you live. You don't cleanly own a single right you can hold up and enforce everywhere. That's the gap.

What a real ownership right would look like — and the bill chasing it

The first serious federal attempt to close that gap is the NO FAKES Act (the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act). The concept is the part worth holding onto, separate from the bill: a single national right, for every person and not just celebrities, over digital replicas of your voice and your face — one answer instead of fifty.

Where it actually stands, honestly, because this matters: it's S.4591, the 2026 version, reintroduced in May 2026 with Senator Coons leading and a bipartisan group behind it (Blackburn, Klobuchar, Tillis, and Schiff are among the cosponsors), and the Senate Judiciary Committee took it up in June 2026. As I write this it is not law. It's a bill in committee, an earlier version already stalled once, and like most bills it may never pass. So read what follows as "what this kind of right would do," not "what the law now gives you."

As drafted, it would let you demand that a platform take down an unauthorized digital replica of you through a notice-and-takedown process modeled on the DMCA, and give platforms a safe harbor if they register an agent and pull the fake on a valid notice. And it would put real money behind the demand — roughly $5,000 per work against an individual who made or spread the fake, $25,000 per work against a platform that tried in good faith but got it wrong, and up to $750,000 per work against a platform that just ignores valid takedown notices, plus punitive damages for willful abuse and attorney's fees. Those figures are as drafted and will move in markup — don't quote them as settled law. The 2026 version also added a counter-notice process and carve-outs for parody, news, and documentary use, which the earlier draft was criticized for lacking.

Why this lands on us harder than almost anyone

The people who lose the most to synthetic sexual content are women, and the numbers are genuinely ugly. By the most-cited count, around 96% of the deepfake videos online are nonconsensual pornography, and about 99% of those target women; nudify sites pull millions of visits a month. I can't hand you a clean "performers specifically" figure — I haven't seen an honest one, and I'd rather say that than invent a stat — but you don't need a study to see the exposure. A working performer's face is already all over the internet, in exactly the poses and lighting these models train on. We're not a hypothetical target for this; we're the convenient one.

Which is why the bill is worth paying attention to even in its unfinished state. For once a piece of federal legislation is pointed at that problem instead of at us — most of the laws creators have had to plan around lately add restrictions. This one, for a change, would hand us a weapon.

The catch I'd want you to hear too

I'm not going to sell you only the good half. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and others have real objections to NO FAKES, and they're not cranks for raising them. Their core worry: the bill creates a new intellectual-property-style right rather than a privacy right, and a takedown system with that kind of money attached pushes platforms toward automated upload filters — and filters are notoriously bad at telling a malicious fake apart from lawful parody, criticism, or news. The earlier version drew fire for offering fewer safeguards than even the DMCA; the counter-notice added in 2026 was a direct answer to that.

I want the lever — I want a fake of me to come down fast and cost the person who built it — and I'm wary of standing up a censorship machine to get it. Both of those are true at the same time, and anyone handing you only one of them is selling you something. The honest position is that this is a hard trade-off, not a slam dunk, and the exact wording is where it gets won or lost.

What I'd actually do, bill or no bill

None of this is a reason to wait around for Congress. The durable moves are the same whether NO FAKES passes or dies in committee:

• Keep the paperwork tight so you're not handing your likeness over on paper in the first place — that's the defense half, and it's the part fully in your control today. The two contract posts above and the free model release and agreement tools are where I'd start.
• Find out what your own state's right of publicity covers. It varies enormously, and it's the right you can actually use right now. A lawyer in your state, not a blog post, gives you that answer.
• Use the takedown channels that already exist — platform reporting for nonconsensual intimate images, and a DMCA notice anywhere your real footage (not a wholly generated fake) is being reused.
• Watch the bill; don't bank on it. If it passes you'll have a stronger, national lever. Until it does, the patchwork is what you've got, so build on the parts you control.

The two fences

Here's how I hold the whole thing. A contract is a fence around the likeness you license — you decide what you hand over, and the posts on reading those clauses are about building that fence well. A statutory right is a fence around the likeness you never licensed at all — the version of you a stranger generates without asking. Right now most of us only really have the first fence, cobbled together state by state. NO FAKES is the first serious attempt to build the second one nationally.

It isn't law, and it might not become law. But the concept — that you own a right to your own face, one you can enforce against someone you never signed a thing with — is the one worth understanding now, while the tools to take that face keep getting a little better every month.

I'm not a lawyer; talk to one in your state about your own situation. But don't let the contract posts fool you into thinking the paperwork is the whole fight. The half you didn't sign for is the half that's coming, and it's worth knowing whether you own anything when it arrives.

— Sly