Your Face is the New Master Recording: Identity Rights in the Age of AI and Streaming
Session details:
Streaming transformed how audiences consume content. Artificial intelligence is transforming how humans themselves can be consumed. We are now living in a moment when a person’s face, voice, and likeness can be replicated with astonishing accuracy and distributed across platforms without their awareness or consent. The distance between the real self and the digital self is becoming wider every year, and that gap is where risk and opportunity now live.
In the creator economy, identity has become the most valuable currency. Influencers, founders, executives, and professionals build entire businesses on their name, their voice, their likeness, and their narrative. Yet they rarely think of their identity as an asset that must be owned, protected, licensed, and enforced. They think of identity as something personal, but streaming culture has made it commercial. When AI enters that landscape, identity becomes vulnerable in ways that feel human and yet operate like property.
There is an emerging trend of identity piracy. Deepfakes, voice clones, AI-generated personas, and platform-fed narrative manipulation are beginning to take on a life of their own. Some of these uses are creative or harmless. Others are predatory. The line between tribute and impersonation, between parody and exploitation, is now blurred. At the same time, creators are losing control of the very thing their businesses depend on. Many creators do not own the rights to their own likeness in their brand deals, their contracts, or their partnerships. When the relationship ends, the likeness often stays behind.
This talk explores the collision between AI innovation, streaming platforms, and the human right to identity ownership. It draws on my work as a trial lawyer with 30+ years in the courtroom protecting the most personal parts of a person’s life, including their identity and their narrative. I will share how Name Image Likeness law is evolving, how identity disputes arise in business dissolutions and creator partnerships, and how AI is accelerating a crisis of ownership and authenticity. While trademarking and IP protection is foundational, my premise goes farther to argue that the threat to identity ownership is a human rights issue with very real legal and financial consequences for creators and the companies that distribute their work.
I offer a framework for understanding identity as a core human asset. Identity must be treated with the same intentionality as a master recording. It must be protected through contracts that limit misuse and grant clear rights. It must be registered and managed with awareness of the platforms that host it. It must be safeguarded against emerging threats like AI impersonation and synthetic performance.
The next era of streaming will be shaped by many technologies, but none will be more disruptive than AI’s ability to copy the human face, human voice, and human essence. In that world the most valuable asset is not the content. It is the human behind it. And the platforms, creators, and companies who understand how to protect identity will be the ones who shape the future of the industry.
