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Rights, likeness and voice: the consent stack for synthetic talent

A generated person is not a free person. Here is the paperwork that has to exist before a campaign ships.

By Matheus MelloFounder & Principal AI Engineer

The assumption that causes the problem

Because generation feels like production rather than casting, the rights questions that would be obvious with a human on set get skipped. Nobody would film a person without a release; the equivalent step for synthetic talent is routinely missed because there is no moment that prompts it.

Real likeness

Generating a recognisable likeness of a real, identifiable person requires that person's documented written consent for the specific use. Not for AI generally, and not for a previous campaign — for this use.

This includes the awkward internal cases: a founder, an employee, a customer. Being enthusiastic in a meeting is not a release, and the person who agreed may not be there when the campaign is still running.

Voice

Voice is treated as a distinct right and needs its own consent. Cloning a voice from existing recordings without permission is not made acceptable by the recordings having been public.

Scope matters here too: consent for one campaign is not consent for a library the voice can be pulled from indefinitely. Say what it covers and for how long.

Fully synthetic people

A presenter who depicts no real individual avoids the likeness problem and still requires disclosure — and under EU rules, content that looks or sounds like a real person can require labelling even where no specific person is depicted.

It also inherits the claim boundary: a synthetic person must not deliver first-person experience claims, because there is no person who had the experience.

The record

Every campaign should leave behind a provenance record: source assets and their licensing basis, tools used, consents obtained with scope and duration, disclosure text supplied, and approvals.

The purpose is to be able to answer a question in eighteen months, when the campaign is still running, the freelancer has moved on, and someone asks where a particular asset came from. Assembling that after the fact is expensive; capturing it during production costs almost nothing.

Related

AI content disclosure policy — how this shows up in the work.