What Are Personality Rights?

Personality rights encompass the legal protections that allow individuals to control how their identity — including their name, likeness, voice, image, and other recognizable personal attributes — is used commercially. In the United States, these rights are primarily protected through state-level “right of publicity” statutes. In the European Union, personality rights are addressed through a combination of privacy law, data protection regulations, and unfair competition principles.

The AI Challenge

The emergence of AI digital twins has created fundamental challenges for existing personality rights frameworks. Traditional personality rights law was designed to address the unauthorized use of a person’s existing image or likeness in advertising. It was not designed to address the training and deployment of generative AI systems that create entirely new performances using a person’s identity as input. This distinction between reproduction and generation creates significant legal uncertainty that current statutes do not adequately resolve.

Approximately 35 U.S. states recognize some form of right of publicity. The EU AI Act introduces transparency requirements for AI-generated content. Several states have enacted deepfake-specific legislation. However, no comprehensive framework exists for licensing personality rights for generative AI deployment, making contractual frameworks the primary protection mechanism for creators.

See also: Biometric Sovereignty, AI Digital Twin