You Can Sell Your Face to AI. But What Happens When You Want It Back?

For £1,500, *Lucy, a 23-year-old in the UK, agreed to let an AI company use her likeness. But the deal became more complicated when she realised the agreement could give the company broad rights over how her image was used commercially.

Lucy’s experience points to a growing business around AI-generated likenesses. In China, new platforms are paying people between $15 and $700 to license their faces for adverts, games, and microdramas.

With people now able to put a price on their faces and voices, what exactly are they selling, how long can companies use them, and what happens when they change their minds?

Techloy spoke to cybersecurity strategist Matthew Rosenquist and lawyer Daniel Akobe about the risks, rights, and trade-offs involved.

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AI is turning faces and voices into assets people can license

This is the idea: a person provides images, video, or voice recordings, and a company gets permission to use that material to create or train AI-generated content.

China provides one of the major examples of how this market is developing. Rest of World reported that platforms such as ActID and New Claw were building marketplaces where people could license their likenesses for AI productions. Users can choose where their faces may appear and set prices based on factors such as permitted use and the number of productions involved.

ActID said that two AI drama productions had licensed around 10 faces through its platform, with prices ranging from 99 to 500 yuan ($15 to $74) per episode. New Claw, meanwhile, has set a minimum price of 500 yuan ($74) per image.

That makes the attraction pretty obvious: a person does not necessarily need to act in a production, attend a shoot, or become a public figure. Their likeness itself becomes the product.

The problem with giving AI your biometrics

A photograph can be replaced, a password can be changed, but your face and voice are different. Matthew Rosenquist, a cybersecurity strategist and adviser, says the biggest concern is what happens when biometric information is connected to systems used for authentication.

“If ever any of your biometrics, either individually or in combination, are used for some type of authentication,  handing that information to another company means it can be spoofed or misused in some way to either give somebody else access or potentially deny you access to something you should have.”

The concern is not theoretical; the US Federal Trade Commission has warned that biometric technologies raise significant privacy and data-security concerns. It has also specifically examined the risks of AI voice cloning, including fraud and misuse of biometric information.

The FTC notes that modern voice-cloning systems can reproduce a person's voice using relatively small amounts of audio. It has warned that cloned voices can be used to impersonate family members, business executives, and other people in scams.

That does not mean everyone who licenses a voice will have it used for fraud. The point is that once a highly identifying piece of information is shared, the consequences of losing control over it can be different from losing control over an ordinary piece of data.

A £1,500 deal shows how easily the trade-off can be missed