Page 8 - Katten Kattwalk and Kattison Avenue - Winter 2026 - Issue 5

Fashion’s Machine Age?

Fashion and entertainment professionals

take note as New York enacts new AI laws.

By Cynthia Martens

ew York City is the sun around which the US media and
fashion system orbits, home to numerous modeling agencies
and thousands of models and photographers, as well as
Nmany leading fashion brands and advertising agencies.

Now, New York State, through several new laws, is regulating the use
of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in the creative industries that call
the Big Apple home. In a nod to entertainers, on December 11, 2025,
Governor Kathy Hochul signed two of the bills into law at the local New
York office of SAG-AFTRA, the labor union representing film, television
and radio artists.
Senate Bill 8391, which went into immediate effect, requires the
creators of expressive audiovisual works who want to use a deceased
personality’s digital replica in an audiovisual work or sound recording, or
for the live performance of a musical work, to secure the prior consent
of the deceased personality’s heirs. The new law also amends a key
definition, such that “digital replica” now means “a computer-generated,
highly realistic, electronic performance that is readily identifiable as the
voice or visual likeness of an individual, but either the actual individual
did not actually perform or the actual individual did perform, but the
fundamental character of the performance or appearance has been
materially altered.”
Back in 2020, when New York first enacted its post-mortem right of
publicity, state law carried narrower protections for unauthorized use of
a deceased performer’s digital replica, requiring only a disclaimer (if the
digital replica was unlikely to deceive the public into thinking that its
use was authorized). Andriy Baidak/Shutterstock.com

8 katten.com/intellectualproperty