EQUITY has launched a groundbreaking AI toolkit to protect performers from a surge in the unregulated technology across the entertainment industry.

The new resource sets out ethical use of AI and provides legal templates for artists to enforce their legal rights.

It includes a template AI contract to protect artists engaging with “performance cloning” work as well as model AI clauses to protect them from having their performance cloned without their consent.

Developed in partnership with intellectual property expert Dr Mathilde Pavis, it also has a template take-down notice to tackle intellectual property infringement by platforms and websites.

Dr Pavis said: “The UK legal framework is not well designed to protect performers from unauthorised imitations of their work using AI technology.  

“The Equity toolkit is a very good, but temporary, solution to protect performers until the UK government reforms the law.”

Performance cloning refers to creating a synthetic performance by recording, using or reproducing the performance, voice or likeness of an artist by machine learning systems.