AI & Protecting Likeness & Styles: Endless Possibility & New Responsibilities

If there’s one takeaway from the latest Indiana Jones sequel featuring a de-aged CGI Harrison Ford for the first 20 minutes, it is that epic franchises will continue well beyond the lifespan of the stars but will still feature the stars from hereon out.?When one's likeness is used for a sequel or for any other creative mash-up or form of entertainment, let’s hope it is with their permission and for their estate’s benefit.

Happy to say, our team is working on this. But how can we all make this so, you may ask?

(1) It starts with new "anti-impersonation" and likeness-rights legislation our team is exploring (and was shared by our GC Dana Rao this week in congress) that advocates for protecting a creator’s style in AI-generated content when it jeopardizes their economic benefit. If Harrison Ford’s likeness was ever being used without his (or his estate’s) benefit, that would be an obvious case, but how about any creative professional with a distinct style on Behance or in any other forum? If you’re intentionally leveraging their style?in a way that would otherwise benefit?to impersonate?them, they should be able to protect themselves and seek remedy.

(2) The second solve here is the missing attribution layer in the human creative (and increasingly hybrid creator) world. Almost five years ago, our team launched the Content Authenticity initiative - am open source effort to?add tamper-evident cryptographic metadata to any asset ?(image, video, live streaming, etc) at the point of creation or generation. We call these “content credentials,” and?over 1500 members ?including Canon, AP, Getty Images, BBC, Nikon, Leica, Synthesia, Stability, Spawning, TruePic, Reuters, NVIDIA have signed up. Right now, every single asset generated in Adobe Firefly also includes content credentials by default. The purpose of this is not to call out what is fake and what is real, but rather to help those who WANT to be trusted, transparent and get attribution do so. And it turns out, this is a lot of us. From Illustrators and video editors to the greatest brands of the world and nearly every enterprise company, they care A LOT about getting attribution and demonstrating (and attesting to) how something was made (or how a model was trained) in this new world.

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So, how does this all come back to Harrison Ford and the creative professionals among us, and what can you do to help?

(1) Let’s embrace new technology but advocate for Creators to benefit from their unique styles and likeness. Not only is this critical for their own careers, but it helps incentivize the creative industry to continue raising the bar of wild experiences that inspire us. Entirely new tools and marketplaces may emerge that enable creators to license their style and likeness to others, allowing them to cut out middlemen and achieve reach and economic benefit previously unimaginable.

(2) Let’s get content credentials adopted everywhere - we need device manufacturers (Apple, Google) and social media platforms (META, Twitter, etc) to get on board...

And finally, let’s be cautiously optimistic about the world ahead. By both embracing the new technology while building solutions to make it work for us more than against us, we push the industry forward.