Originally Posted by Elliott Kayne
Can a voice be copyrighted? Or trademark?
A voice cannot be copyrighted, but it can be trademarked.
See: https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/voiceover-usage-rights-explained-76226/

However, I suspect that AI voices will run afoul of copyright laws. Imagine that you had a recording Elvis singing a song. You then took the words from the recording, re-arranged them, pitch shifted and time stretched them, and released the result as a new song. That would be a copyright infringement. Even though you transformed the original song into a new song, you were still using the copyrighted performance of Elvis.

AI companies believe they can get around the copyright infringement by saying the because the AI "learns" the vocal style, they are not copying the original performance.

But how the data is stored and transformed is irrelevant. The AI has literally been trained to construct an audio signal that resembles Elvis' voice within a certain margin of error. The fact that that the neural network can create a credible imitation of Elvis demonstrates that audio data has been encoded into the network - even if it's difficult to point to exactly where it is, or how the network uses it.

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If so does it ever expire? Will Elvis's voice at one time in the future become public domain?
The copyright of a performance will eventually expire, and the recording will be in the public domain.

However, a trademark will not expire if it is in continued use.

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Do we have to put disclaimers on our releases such as: AI : Elvis not really singing
According to the ELVIS law, unless you have rights to the vocals, you won't be able to use them at all.

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The AI company that seems to be on the leading edge of celebrity voices is Lalals.com a German based company. They have 100s of celebrity voices and growing more each day.
As I mentioned in my original post, that they are using celebrity's names and likenesses to promote their service. That is enough to run them afoul with trademark issues.

With the upcoming ELVIS Act, it will be illegal for companies to use unauthorized AI voices - at least in Tennessee.

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?