This was originally produced as a social video. Below is a script version.
Make illegal any use of a person’s likeness in any AI-generated video. Do it now.
Here’s why.
For 150 years, courts have recognized something called the right of publicity — the idea that your face, your voice, your identity belongs to you. Not to a tech company, not to a political campaign, not to a creepy ex. You.
And yet, with AI video tools, we’re suddenly acting like that principle is optional. It isn’t. The academic literature is already clear: when people lose control of their likeness, trust erodes, reputations get hijacked, and democratic discourse gets polluted. (See: Danielle Citron’s work on “intimate privacy,” the Brookings analysis on synthetic media harms, and UVA’s legal research on coerced or manipulated identity.)
Ethically, this is basic: consent isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the only thing that separates communication from exploitation.
Legally, we’re behind. Deepfake laws exist in some states, but they’re inconsistent, full of loopholes and mostly reactive. Meanwhile, generative video is getting so good that ordinary people can’t distinguish real from fake. That’s not a theoretical threat — Stanford’s Internet Observatory has already documented political deepfakes spreading faster than fact-checks, and the EU’s 2024 AI Act explicitly warns that unlabelled synthetic media undermines public trust.
So the rule has to be simple: If you want to use someone’s likeness in an AI-generated video, you need their explicit permission. If you don’t have it, it’s illegal. Period. No fair-use dodge, no parody loophole big enough to drive a truck through.
This isn’t about locking down creativity — it’s about preventing impersonation, fraud and emotional manipulation at population scale. Deepfake porn and fabricated political speech are already exploding. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to put this toothpaste back in the tube.
Democratic societies work because we trust what we see and hear — and because we each get to own our identity. So let’s draw the bright line now.
Make illegal any use of a person’s likeness in any AI-generated video. Do it now.