Generative AI, Deepfakes & Digital Replicas

Generative AI represents a double-edged sword for talent in the entertainment industry, bringing creative and monetization opportunities but also challenging risks.

This special report from Variety Intelligence Platform offers a deep dive into how name, image, likeness and voice (NILV) of actors and artists will be protected from misuse, as talent agencies and employers aim to combat the online spread of nonconsensual celebrity deepfakes and synthetic content.

Meanwhile, AI digital replicas are also becoming available to exploit for celebrities’ creative and commercial use. As authorized AI versions of talent likeness increasingly appear in content, celebs will need assurances that technical systems are in place for them to engage safely and benefit from their digital replicas to create new content experiences.

Synthetic media detection, commonly referred to as deepfake detection, will be key to removing infringing content at scale, particularly solutions capable of identifying specific individual face and voice likenesses in content. Other providers are building the systems that will give actors and artists technical means to make, own, control, create with and monetize their digital replicas.

Offering an early view into how an emerging set of solutions and standards are being conceived and developed, VIP+’s data-filled report diagnoses deepfake harms and identifies early use cases of celebrity digital replicas.

Further, it examines how an assembly line of solutions is beginning to form for talent NILV data capture, storage, management, identification and synthetic media detection and provenance.

Research for this report included 17 independent interviews conducted on background from September to November 2024 with sources at talent agencies, Adobe, American Film Institute, Human & Digital (HAND), Hyperreal, Loti, McAfee, Partnership on AI (PAI), Reality Defender, Resemble AI, Respeecher, Scan Truck, Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), Truepic, Vermillio and Videntifier.

Several charts feature select results from original surveys developed by VIP+ in collaboration with global consultative market research firms SmithGeiger Group and HarrisX.