A look at the increased use of celebrity deepfakes in advertising, with or without their permission, raising legal and ethical questions
Patrick Coffee / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
By late 2022, deepfakes had already found two commercial footholds: Synthesia's multilingual corporate training videos showed the sanctioned side, while nonconsensual porn demonstrated how little protection a likeness had once synthesized. Patrick Coffee's reporting captures the moment the technique crossed into mainstream brand advertising — sometimes with the celebrity's blessing, often without it.
The follow-on coverage shows how that ambiguity resolved: rather than waiting for legal clarity, celebrities moved to control the asset themselves, with [[a:841284|aging star athletes signing deals to license AI duplicates of themselves for de-aging and other campaign uses]].
First-order effects
- Advertisers running unauthorized celebrity deepfakes are exposed on right-of-publicity and IP grounds even as the work ships, because regulators worldwide have approved few rules constraining them.
- Celebrities whose faces appear in campaigns they never approved lose pricing power over their own endorsement value until they assert it contractually.
Second-order effects
- The licensed-duplicate market emerges as the defensive response: stars who sign AI-likeness deals convert a piracy risk into a revenue line and give brands a consented alternative to bootleg synthesis.
- Platforms are pulled into adjudicating likeness rights at scale, as Meta's and YouTube's use of celebrity identities for AI chatbots and songs forces explicit safeguard and licensing decisions.
Third-order effects
- With [[a:834255|China imposing deepfake rules while most other authorities hold back over free-speech concerns]], likeness governance fragments by jurisdiction, leaving advertisers to self-police where law does not.
- If the pattern holds, celebrity identity becomes a formally priced, licensable media asset — with consent agreements, not statutes, setting the boundary between authorized and stolen likeness.
The trend: Celebrity likeness is becoming a licensable AI asset class, with consent-based duplicate deals racing ahead of the sparse regulation meant to govern them.