This isn't about impersonation but your copyright over your own likeness that can't be used without consent. Take a game like FIFA or Madden, they have to negotiate with the players (or their unions) in order to create realistic digital counterparts (including the names) and arguably better games often find themselves unable to compete because of this.

> anyone watching these videos can see that it is NOT Jay Z in the video.

I'm not that familiar with JayZ and it's more than enough that I would have been convinced and not given it a second thought. It's not obviously parody and the only tip off it was even fake was "(speech synthesis)" in the title.

Is it really copyright? Based on what I know of it, it doesn't seem like copyright would apply. Trademark I could sorta see, if they registered their likeness.

Quite a few places recognise "personality rights" [1] although the details vary from place to place. Sports games tend to comply so they can be sold everywhere.

Some form of personality rights make sense to me, as otherwise Mickey Mouse would enjoy more legal protection than you and I. And obviously it's not an absolute right - you can't sue red light cameras for photographing you.

There's also the question of whether a neural net trained on a copyrighted image or video is a derivative work - in contrast to a 3D model made by an artist who merely references copyrighted images or videos.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights

I was replying to a comment saying there are laws against impersonating people, so just changing the context because you think it’s not obvious that these are deep fakes creates a straw man to argue with. I’m not sure I believe you that you couldn’t understand that these were AI generated speech either.

There's also defamation laws. I'm sure a lawyer could make a good argument for banning a deep fake, or suing for the existence of one if it causes defamation.