Whose Face, Whose Voice?

Authentication

The showing a party must make before a court treats an exhibit as what the party claims: evidence sufficient to support that finding, under Federal Rule of Evidence 901 and section 90.901, Florida Statutes. The bar is low, and the jury decides in the end whether the item is genuine. A photo can clear it through a witness who says it accurately shows the scene, or through proof that the process that made it is reliable, which Florida courts call the silent-witness theory.

Evidence Produced by Artificial Intelligence

Output that an AI system produces and a party offers as proof, such as a program’s comparison of two paintings, with no expert on the stand to explain how the system reached it. Proposed Federal Rule of Evidence 707 would hold that output to the reliability test an expert’s testimony must meet under Rule 702. It is a proposal, not a rule in force, and it reaches output offered as analysis, not a fake offered as a real photograph.

Deepfake Detection Limits

A deepfake is an image, video, or recording made or altered with AI to show something that never happened, and the federal evidence committee calls deepfakes easy to make and hard to detect. So a party disputing a file looks past its surface to the original, its metadata, and the people who handled it. The committee’s working draft of a Rule 901(c), not yet proposed, would require evidence of fabrication from the opponent before the proponent must prove the item more likely than not authentic.

Human Authorship

The Copyright Act protects only works a human being authored, as the D.C. Circuit held in Thaler v. Perlmutter. A person who uses AI still owns the copyright in what they contribute, such as a photo they took, words they wrote, or a creative selection, arrangement, or change of the machine’s output. In an application, the author claims that human part and disclaims AI-generated material that is more than de minimis, and the Copyright Office says prompts alone are unlikely to count.

Right of Publicity

The right to control commercial use of your name and likeness. Section 540.08, Florida Statutes, bars using a person’s name, photograph, or other likeness for trade, commercial, or advertising purposes without consent, and it allows an injunction and damages, including a reasonable royalty. Tyne v. Time Warner Entertainment Co. holds that the statute does not reach a publication, such as a film, that does not directly promote a product or service.

Digital Replica

A newly created, computer-generated, highly realistic representation readily identifiable as a real person’s voice or visual likeness, as the NO FAKES Act of 2026 defines it. The bill would give every person a federal property right to authorize such a replica, with a notice-and-takedown process and exclusions for news, documentary, commentary, satire, and parody. It is a bill, not law, and as reported it would displace some state claims over replicas while sparing state laws aimed at sexual or election deepfakes.

Notice and Removal

The TAKE IT DOWN Act’s duty on a covered platform, a public site or app built mainly for user content, to take requests to remove intimate images posted without consent, real or AI-made. A valid request, in writing, carries four things: a signature, enough to find the image, a good-faith statement that it was not consensual, and contact information. The platform must remove the image within 48 hours and make reasonable efforts to remove known identical copies, and the FTC enforces the duty.

Altered Sexual Depiction

Florida’s term, in section 836.13, for an image altered to show an identifiable person nude or in sexual conduct the person never engaged in. Creating one without consent, or spreading one maliciously, is a felony, and an aggrieved person may sue for an injunction, $10,000 or actual damages (whichever is greater), and attorney fees. Since 2025 the statute also gives platforms a Florida removal duty on the federal model: 48 hours, triggered by a request with the same four elements.

Part 1: Read, Watch, and Make Your File

Start with the background reading. Then watch the video under the title from 4:56 to about 13:56, where an intellectual property scholar explains why no one body of law protects a face or a voice completely. Read the sources in Resources at the pages each one names; the FTC’s two pages are for Part 3. Make your file with any AI image editor or voice tool. It may be a photo you took of yourself with the background or an object changed, or a short clip in which a synthetic version of your voice reads a paragraph you wrote. Use only your own face or voice, never anyone else’s, and make nothing a viewer could mistake for proof of a real event. If you would rather not post your face, make the voice clip. Write one line saying what you changed and what kind of tool you used.

Part 2: The Worksheet

Imagine your file offered in a Florida civil case as a genuine, unaltered record of you, and write a one-page worksheet in four sections. The foundation section gives three questions a lawyer would ask a witness to authenticate the file. Mark each with the route it follows: a witness who knows the scene or the voice, or proof about the process that made the file. The objections section gives three objections or questions an opponent would use to show the file was altered. It then says what the opponent would have to show first under the draft Rule 901(c), and whether proposed Rule 707 would reach your file at all. Run the Rule Tracker to see where Rule 707 stands today, and check its answer on the uscourts.gov page it names.

The registration section says, in a paragraph, what you could claim in a copyright application’s Author Created field and what you would list under Material Excluded, and why. The likeness section supposes that a stranger copies your file and posts it twice, first in an ad for a gym and then in a parody video. It says whether section 540.08 would let you stop each use, and whether your file is a digital replica that the NO FAKES Act, as reported, would reach.

Score the worksheet one point for each section that does what it asks. Then run the Foundation and Objection Examiner in a fresh chat with your foundation and objections sections, and the Registration Guide in another with your registration paragraph. Revise once and score the worksheet again.

Part 3: The Takedown Request

Hypothetical: Your firm’s client, a 24-year-old Daytona State College graduate, learns that a former acquaintance has posted AI-generated sexual images bearing her face to a social media platform and a message board. She has screenshots with URLs and dates. She wants the images down today and wants to know what else the law offers her.

Write the removal request to the social media platform, from you as a person authorized to act for her, to go through the platform’s own removal process. One request can satisfy the federal act and section 836.13(8) together, because their four elements match. Use bracketed placeholders for her name, her signature, the contact details, and the URLs. Then write a note of about 150 words to the client. It tells her what the platform must do once it receives a valid request, and by when, and where she can report a platform that fails. It also names one remedy under Florida law that goes beyond removal.

Score the request and note one point for each of five parts. The signature part asks whether the request is signed by the client or by you as her authorized representative, and says which. The location part asks whether it identifies each image with enough, such as its URL and the date it appeared, for the platform to find it. The consent part asks whether it states her good-faith belief that the images are not consensual and gives the platform the facts it needs to see that. The contact part asks whether it gives the platform a way to reach her or you. The note part asks whether the note states the 48-hour duty and the duty toward known identical copies correctly, names where to report a failure, and names a Florida remedy with its source. Run the Notice Checker in a fresh chat with the request, the note, and the text of section 3 of the act and subsection (8) of section 836.13, revise once, and score again.

Part 4: Post Your Work

Create a single new discussion thread. Post your file with its one-line description, the revised worksheet, and the revised request and note, with no real names, addresses, or phone numbers in them. Give both scores for the worksheet and both for the request and note, and add a sentence on what the Notice Checker led you to change.

Part 5: Share Chat Link

Include one AI chat link with a 1–2 sentence explanation of what the conversation shows and why you chose to share it.

Rule Tracker

A question about a pending rule has a date built into it, and a model’s knowledge stops at a date of its own. Asking for the sequence of steps and the page to check, instead of a confident answer, leaves the last word with the source.

Foundation and Objection Examiner

Asking you what each question proves is Socratic elicitation. Because the model asks and you answer, the reasoning on the worksheet stays yours, and the reminder that neither draft rule is in force keeps a proposal from being argued as law.

Registration Guide

Questioning you element by element before it judges your entries draws the line between your work and the machine’s out of your own answers. Tying each point to the Office’s guidance lets you trace it to a page you can open.

Notice Checker

Reading the request as the person who must act on it within 48 hours is role assignment, and it shows you what a reviewer can and cannot use. Holding every check to the statute text you pasted keeps the model from inventing a fifth requirement and passing it off as law.