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The Rise of AI And Image Rights Issues

June 14, 2024AI Article

When conversations about Artificial Intelligence come up, it doesn’t take long before someone starts to talk about Terminator and the rise of Skynet. Whilst that is obviously a gross exaggeration of the position that we find ourselves in, it is a slight insight into how many people feel about the technology.

The problems that we’re having with it during these early years of its proliferation are much more mundane than the end of civilisation as we know it, but at the same time are very important to those involved. That seems to be particularly skewed towards the entertainment industry at present, with rights being the central topic.

Deepcake & the Purchase of Rights

deepcakeThere is a company in the United States of America called Deepcake. The name, one imagines, is a play on the term ‘deepfake’, which is when a video of a person is digitally altered so that they appear to be someone else, usually a famous person.

Deepcake has aims to become ‘the world’s largest talent agency’, with the company’s Chief Executive Officer, Maria Chmir, saying that discussions are underway in order to strike deals with the estates of dead film stars in order to be able to bring them ‘back to life’ using deepfake technology. Similarly, Deepcake are looking to buy the rights to use living actors in their films sometimes.

In the September of 2022, Bruce Willis became the first major movie star to sell his image rights to Deepcake. It meant that they are able to use his moving and talking imagine in any film and TV productions that they are responsible for. The actor took the decision after he had retired from acting owing to being diagnosed with aphasia, which is a condition that affects a person’s ability to speak and communicate.

Deepcake didn’t waste much time making use of their new rights, putting him on their website. He had also previously starred in a commercial for a phone company in Russia, with his head put onto a body double.

Sandro Monetti, the director of a TV documentary about the use of AI in the entertainment industry called Tech to the Future, said that companies like Deepcake wanted a ‘large slice of the Hollywood money pie’ and that it could ‘upend’ the industry. Not only would it allow stars like Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn and James Dean to return to the big screen in entirely new productions, it would also allow the big stars of the modern day to complete several new projects alongside one another.

Chmir said, “We create digital twins of celebrities and the actual production process doesn’t require the physical presence of a celebrity on stage.”

Some Stars Aren’t on Board

scarlett johansson sitting next to her holywood star

Whilst there are some stars that have been willing enough to see their image or voice used in some Artificial Intelligence settings, the same isn’t true of all of them. In the May of 2024, for example, Scarlett Johansson was both ‘shocked’ and ‘disturbed’ when OpenAI, one of the most prominent Artificial Intelligence companies out there, used a voice ‘eerily similar’ to hers on one of its chatbots.

Johansson provided the voice for ‘Samantha’, a female AI character in the 2013 film Her by Spike Jonze. When OpenAI’s new chatbot launched, comparisons were immediately drawn between what ‘Sky’ sounded like and how Samantha sounded in the film.

OpenAI, the company behind the likes of Chat-GPT, said that it would remove the voice immediately but was insistent that there was not meant to be any form of imitation of Johansson. This, according to the film star, was undermined by the fact that Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, ‘insinuated that the similarity was intentional, tweeting a single world ‘her’ – a reference to the film in which I voiced a chat system, Samantha, who forms an intimate relationship with a human’.

Not only that, but Johansson said that Mr Altman had approached her in the September of 2023 to ask her to voice the system when it was released.

Johansson summed up the issue that is facing artists in the post-AI world, sending two legal letters to the company to ask how the voice had been made. She said, “In a time when we are all grappling with deepfakes and the protection of our own likeness, our own work, our own identities, I believe these are questions that deserve absolute clarity”.

The issue came just six months after an actors’ strike all but paused the output of Hollywood as stars, both big and small, wanted some safeguards put in place on the using of Artificial Intelligence. The age of AI is one in which the exploitation of people could happen whether they like it or not.

A Dangerous Precedent

Had Johansson not done something to stop the use of a ‘sound-a-like’ of her voice in the OpenAI chatbot, it might well have set a dangerous precedent. Dan Stein, the Head of the AI voice licensing company Voice-Swap, said, “To use someone’s voice without permission feels particularly invasive at a time when distrust of AI and concern over its potential harms are rampant.

Whether OpenAI trained their new Sky voice using audio from Scarlett Johansson or a sound-a-like, the fact remains that she refused permission and her identity was exploited regardless. It sets a dangerous precedent for copyright and consent if the most prominent company in the field behaves in this way”.

It isn’t just film and TV stars that face issues with Artificial Intelligence companies either. The New York Times planned to launch a lawsuit against OpenAI for using ‘millions’ of articles it had published as part of the training of its Chat-GPT AI model. Similarly, both John Grisham and George RR Martin had plans to use the company over similar allegations.

As the use of Artificial Intelligence grows and more and more companies make use of it, it is likely that an increased number of questions around rights will occur. Scarlett Johansson is one of the most famous actresses in the world, but what happens if it is a little-known actor that such companies abuse the image of?