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Even When it Looks & Quacks Like A Duck, It Might be an AI Duck.
- propertylawsociety
- Jan 22, 2024
- 3 min read
Written by: Marisa Capano (1L, Lincoln Alexander)
We’ve all doom-scrolled before, enamored by the lives of friends, influencers, and celebrities on our favorite social media apps. It’s no secret that most of these posts are highly filtered, posed, and ‘manufactured. But what if I told you that sometimes, they’re not even really real?
Image: The video of “Billie” introducing herself shows a video of a woman who reflects supermodel, Kendall Jenner. Source: Too Fab[1]
AI Bots Take Over Social Media
Imagine stumbling across someone online who looks like Kendall Jenner, sounds like Kendall Jenner, but is not actually Kendall Jenner. Meta has recently created an artificial intelligence (AI) generated bot, named 'Billie'. This video sparked debate as to whether the person in the video is an AI model, or if it is the real-life celebrity. The woman, in the video, who looks and sounds exactly like Kendal Jenner, introduces herself as Billie, and asks viewers to message her, and to ask for advice.[2] Other celebrities, such as social media figure Charlie D’Amileo have also had characters made which look like her.
Realizing that the figure on your screen is some AI-cyborg-mish-mash of a real person’s face and voice transplanted onto a stranger is quite…creepy. Some people have likened it to the “uncanny valley” phenomenon, which is described as the “relationship between the human-like appearance of a robotic object and the emotional response it evokes” (source). Similarly, Kendall Jenner, a well known socialmedialite, super model, and and reality tv star, is suddenly a robot clone named Billie – and we are left feeling like something is not quite right.
What Are Peoples’ Rights to Publicity?
So, can corporations now steal the voices, faces, and likeness of public figures through AI for advertising?
In Canada, the Right of Publicity is protected by the Common Law tort of “Wrongful Appropriation of Personality”, sometimes referred to as “Misappropriation of Personality” being the unauthorized commercial exploitation of a person’s name, image, voice or likeness.
In Canada, people have the exclusive right to license their personality attributes to others, whether for commercial gain or not. It seems as though there is a large influx of public figures, both in Canada and the US, who are leveraging the rights to their own likeness and licensing it out for monetization. Celebrities like Kendall Jenner seem to have allowed companies such as Meta to use their features for the development of ‘characters’ like Billie on their platforms, therefore authorizing commercial exploitation of their likeness.
Meta said they had partnered with celebrities to 'play and embody' their AI counterparts - leading to the belief that photos and videos of 'Billie', the name of the characters created by Meta are AI generated[3]. According to the NY Post, celebrities who are used as inspiration for these new characters are being paid up to 5 million dollars[4].
Meta also says that this new feature is meant to represent characters and not the actual celebrities. And yet – with public figures now licensing out their most distinctive commodity (their faces), it becomes quite difficult to distinguish between a public figures real beliefs/personas/values.
Influencer Marketing in the Age of AI
Never before has someone’s likeness been so easy to take and mimic, and never before has this been so crucial to the sale of a product or service. In recent years, the marketing landscape has been transformed by the trend of “influencer marketing”. With the rise of social media and the decline of traditional advertising methods, marketing strategies are increasingly relying on public figures and “influencers” to push products/services to their online following.
But there is also a cautious distrust brewing amongst consumers when it comes to influencer marketing. More and more consumers are becoming “fatigued” to influencers pushing product – and yet, influencers now have the option to sell their likeness to corporations to push products they’ve never even seen, much less tried.
The way we perceive ‘authenticity’ as it relates to advertising, marketing, and simply existing in the online world seems to be changing. As AI dips its hand into influencer marketing, how do you as a consumer feel about being sold a product through a ‘robot’? Fooled? Confused? Intrigued? Betrayed? Or some other complex emotion?
[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12622719/Kendall-Jenners-alter-ego-duping-fans-AI-generated-posts.html
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