“It’s time for personality rights for every artist and every worker.”
By Paul Fleming, Equity General Secretary
Prophesies about the likelihood of AI destroying human life aside, its most terrible and terrifying potential is the assault on what it means to be human. From AI slop acting as the gruel of the online Far Right, to ‘Tilly Norwood’ the oft-malfunctioning synthetic alleged AI actor, both the machines and their masters are attacking the working class and seeking to reduce workers and artists to automatons.
A big part of what makes you ‘you’, is your face, your voice, your movement, your likeness: your personality. As world governments finally wake up to the fact that tech bros are not their friend, Andy Burnham’s government has the opportunity to give us all de facto copyright over ourselves. These protections are personality rights.
Equity members are seeing their work scraped and stolen. As performers, often with huge bodies of work out on the internet, they are at particular risk of exploitation. They see their voices, faces, bodies and likeness digitally replicated by generative AI without their consent or knowledge, and certainly without any payment. In the worst cases, their likeness can appear in sexually violent content, or pushing products and propaganda AI is, of course, just the latest tool in capitalist extraction of profit at the expense of those without power to challenge it.
It is not only performers who are at risk from their likeness being taken without permission, manipulated by generative AI and replicated in malicious, dishonest or disgusting content. Labour MP Jess Asato is suing xAI for fake sexualised images of her being created by GenAI tool Grok. The AI deepfake video of George Freeman MP apparently defecting from the Tories to Reform became a police case. There are countless examples across social media of AI content damaging trust in news and threatening democracy itself.
Personality rights would give each person rights over their likeness, spanning their unique physical appearance, voice, mannerisms and movement. The current provisions of copyright and data protection have limited applicability to “GenAI”, but personality rights would be effective, proportionate – and popular.
Equity proposes a hybrid approach which comprises a property right for professional performers, for the protection of creatives in commercial contexts, and personal rights to protect all individuals from unauthorised digital replicas. This isn’t radical. It already exists in many countries, and it is a necessary move to catch up with a technology which is rapidly and radically reshaping the creative industries. It would provide a robust and targeted legal framework to protect individuals from abuse while offering an economic right that performers and other workers could license.
A core objection lies in the falsification of images, the creation of deepfakes, the cloning of content for commercial or nefarious purposes without consent or pay. Such activity undermines trust, and in our members’ industries it undermines performers’ income, reputation and personal autonomy, posing a threat to the sustainability of careers in performance.
It is foolish to think that this is a matter for the known face, the politician, the superstar. In fact, these are perhaps the only individuals who may be able to harness a brand to control their own synthetic and take on copies within an existing framework. Much worse is the threat to the jobbing actor, and the overworked lorry driver. Where their movements and likenesses are collected from recordings on TV and tapes, or from the tracking tech in their cab, when synthetics emerge which have just enough of you in them, but lack some elements of your actual face, accent, or mannerisms, low paid workers and trade unions have no recourse, and a limited platform to collectively bargain from.
It’s now a year since the glitching, AI generated synthetic Tilly Norwood was launched, during last year’s Labour Party conference, as an alternative to actors. Whilst mostly a choreographed marketing stunt for a deficient technology, it served as a rallying cry to reclaim ground from a world of big capital in awe of new tech. There are ongoing questions about where the data comes from to train and create these AI synthetics, and whether those inputs were acquired with consent. But if the recent Tilly Norwood interview with Piers Morgan is anything to go by, it won’t be displacing actors wholesale for some time yet.
This is where our Equity collective agreements, mostly bargained on a multi-employer, sectoral basis, come into their own. We have coverage across the vast majority of UK film, TV, and theatre work and are close to securing world leading AI protections for performers. We spent time with our sister union SAG-AFTRA this summer during their negotiations, where among other protections they secured a commitment to a “strong preference for human performance”. This impending win is a classic tale of worker power: where policy fails to move at speed, the negotiating table, and resolve of the workers, can deliver results.
While we can put measures in place within the industry, we need the parallel and supporting protections that personality rights would bring. Burnham’s new government have the chance to show they are on the side of working people, and on the side of decency and democracy, by moving swiftly to introduce protections against unauthorised AI images and digital replicas. It’s time for personality rights for every artist, and every worker.
- Find out more about Equity’s campaign here.
- Paul Fleming is also chairing the Arise Festival event in Liverpool at 6.30PM Monday 28 September: A Fork in the Road Moment: For an Irreversible Shift in Wealth and Power.
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