Celebrities, including aging star athletes, are signing deals to put AI duplicates of themselves into ad campaigns, helping brands de-age them, among other uses
Patrick Coffee / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
The story flips an earlier problem on its head. In late 2022 the Wall Street Journal covered celebrity deepfakes appearing in ads with or without permission, leaving stars exposed and lawyers circling; the de-aging question had already reached film via AI de-aging VFX like Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones turn. What changed is that aging star athletes are now signing deals themselves, converting their likeness from something to be protected into something to be licensed.
First-order effects
- Brands gain a way to run campaigns with de-aged celebrity talent that no longer depends on the star's availability, schedule, or current physical form.
- Celebrities open a new revenue line from existing image archives — paid once per deal rather than per shoot day.
Second-order effects
- Human influencers now compete on two fronts: licensed AI duplicates of famous faces above them and AI-generated virtual influencers already charging thousands of dollars for product promotion below them, squeezing rates in between.
- Talent representation shifts toward likeness management — negotiating usage rights, de-aging terms, and renewal windows becomes a core agency service alongside booking traditional endorsements.
Third-order effects
- If consented licensing becomes the norm, the industry moves from policing unauthorized deepfakes to formalizing likeness rights — contracts, pricing benchmarks, and eventually regulation of who controls a person's digital double.
- Ad production economics tilt toward synthetic assets: a licensed duplicate is reusable across markets and years, so the marginal cost of a new campaign featuring a star falls toward zero.
The trend: Celebrity likenesses are being converted from protected intellectual property into licensable AI assets, with voluntary deals replacing the unauthorized use that defined the first wave.