Who Owns Your Face?

Plus: Apple + OpenAI’s stalled device, iPad M4 leaks, and new AI safety law.

Here’s what’s on our plate:

  • 🎭 Actors fight AI clones in Hollywood and Bollywood.

  • 🧠 AI safety law, iPad leaks, and OpenAI’s device drama.

  • 💡 Roko’s Tip: Spot AI fakes before they go viral.

  • 🗳️ Poll: Should AI-generated actors be banned in film?

Let’s dive in. No floaties needed…

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The Laboratory

The battle over AI-generated stars

Storytelling has long been humanity’s way of sharing ideas and preserving knowledge across generations. Even in today’s digital age, shaped by social media, short videos, and microblogging, films and series continue to shape public understanding of technology and society.

Netflix’s Black Mirror stands out as a cultural touchstone for exploring the darker side of innovation. The series imagines the psychological and social consequences of emerging technologies like AI, VR, and surveillance. In one of its most unsettling episodes, a woman discovers her life being broadcast without consent, her on-screen double created not by an actor but through a quantum computer that replicates a celebrity’s likeness.

What once seemed like dystopian fiction now feels eerily plausible. With rapid advances in generative AI, the scenario of people, or celebrities, signing away rights to their digital likenesses without fully understanding the implications is no longer far-fetched. However, unlike the people in the series, actors in the real world are pushing back against the use of their AI-generated likeness without proper consent.

The fight for personality rights

Reuters recently reported that actors in India are turning to the judiciary to protect their voice and persona. Bollywood actors Abhishek Bachchan and his wife Aishwarya Rai Bachchan have asked a judge to remove and prohibit the creation of AI videos infringing their intellectual property rights.

Other actors, part of the industry, have also voiced concerns about the misuse of their likenesses to generate AI content. India does not have explicit laws protecting the performers from AI video generation, which explains the actors' approach of looking to Google for respite.

The Bachchans want the judiciary to issue a directive that will force Google to take down AI-generated videos of their likeness from YouTube. Beyond the misuse of their likeness, the actors fear that these can be used to train future AI platforms. Meaning they risk losing complete agency over their online presence.  YouTube’s existing content and third-party training policy allows users to consent to the sharing of a video they created to train rival AI models.

However, since not all of the AI-generated videos of the Bachchans have been generated by them, others who did not seek their consent can grant YouTube permission to use their likeness for training future models.

The Bachchans may be the first actors in India to object to their likeness being used without consent, but they are not the only ones.

Hollywood’s uneasy standoff with AI voices

In 2024, Hollywood actor Scarlett Johansson expressed shock when OpenAI’s new voice assistant was launched. At the time, the actor said she was  “angered, and in disbelief” that the updated version of ChatGPT, capable of listening to spoken prompts and responding verbally, had a voice “eerily similar” to hers. To make matters worse, Johansson said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had approached her to lend her voice to ChatGPT, but she declined for “personal reasons.”

OpenAI confirmed this in a blog post, clarifying that she had been invited to provide an additional voice after five others had already been selected, including the one that drew her concern. The company added that it reached out to her again to discuss possibly becoming “a future additional voice.”

As a clarification, OpenAI stated that its AI voices are not meant to “intentionally mimic a celebrity’s distinctive voice,” and stressed that the Sky voice in GPT-4o was not modeled on Johansson but came from “a different professional actor using her own natural speaking voice”.

However, the clarification did little to address the unease felt by Johansson and others within the industry. In Hollywood, unions have been confronting synthetic performers and AI-driven cost-cutting, and the incident further raised concerns over likeness rights.

Unions draw the line: Creativity must stay human

In the United States, the SAG-AFTRA actors' union is protesting the use of an AI-generated ‘actress’ dubbed Tilly Norwood.

The actor was introduced at a film industry conference in Zurich. While the aim was to raise interest in studio executives around the use of generative AI in filmmaking, it sparked a backlash from the actors' union, which said that "creativity is, and should remain, human-centered, and that the union is opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics”.

The union's scathing reaction reflects the dread many in the creative community feel about the intersection of AI and business.

AI’s inroads in creativity

While computer-generated imagery is not new to the film and television industry, the emergence of AI has become a bone of contention between studios and workers. And though AI’s ability to convincingly replicate a feature-length human film performance with AI-stand-ins is yet to materialize, unions have taken to protests and strikes to ensure they are not replaced by generative AI tools.

Towards the end of 2022, in the first instance of workers' protest, the Writers Guild of America went on strike after the union was unable to reach an agreement on new contracts that weighed in on pay scales and script ownership rights.

At the time, writers expressed fears that studios would use generative AI to cut costs by replacing writers and maximizing profits, even at the expense of the quality of the work.

The writers' protest led to a fruitful understanding between workers and the studios. However, this was possible because writers acted pre-emptively and secured their rights; actors, meanwhile, are already feeling the pinch due to the loss of revenue and agency over their online presence.

As witnessed in the case of the Bachchans in India, AI is already being used for generating videos without the actors’ consent. In their lawsuit, the Bachchans have shared hundreds of links and screenshots of what they allege are YouTube videos showing "egregious", "sexually explicit," or "fictitious" AI content. They go on to argue that biased content portraying them negatively could be absorbed by AI systems, spreading false information and infringing on their rights.

Takedown of material on YouTube, though not a wholesome solution, is a start to ensure Big Tech plays its part in protecting the rights of individuals in public life.

According to Reuters, channels exploiting AI-generated likeness of actors are accumulating millions of views. Some are even educating others on how to use X’s Grok AI and Chinese startup MiniMax’s Hailuo AI to turn text prompts into videos. It is important to note that YouTube paid Indian creators $2.4 billion over three years, making AI-generated likenesses of actors a lucrative business opportunity for creators.

So, while actors are not only losing control over their digital identities, their AI videos are being exploited by third parties to generate revenue.

The future of performance: Human-centered or machine-defined?

Unlike Black Mirror, the world does not yet have a quantum computer capable of generating likelinesses. The world has something far more capable.

Generative AI can already produce lifelike likenesses of actors and even average social media users in the online space. OpenAI’s new Sora app is a testament to how far the technology has advanced. And unlike the fictional quantum-generated avatars of Black Mirror, today’s AI can replicate likenesses, voices, and performances with just a few clicks.

In this backdrop, without stronger legal protections and ethical safeguards, not just actors, but also average users risk losing control over their own identities while third parties profit from their images.

As technology continues to blur the line between reality and AI-generated fiction, the industry faces an urgent choice: to ensure creativity remains human-centered, or to let AI rewrite the rules of performance entirely.

Roko Pro Tip

💡 Run a quick reverse image or voice search.

Before sharing anything with a familiar face or celebrity voice, check if it’s AI-made. Use tools like Hive Modartion or Deepware to scan for synthetic content. If it feels too perfect, it probably is.

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Prompt Of The Day

”Create a film synopsis featuring a synthetic actor and explore the ethical fallout.”

Use this to explore future-forward storytelling or train your AI assistant on boundary-pushing creativity.

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🗳️ Should AI-generated actors be allowed in mainstream film?

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