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.
Ogbonda Chivumnovu
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.
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