For actors, selling their AI likeness seems quick and painless—and perhaps increasingly more lucrative. All they have to do is show up and make a bunch of different facial expressions in front of a green screen, then collect their checks. But Alyssa Malchiodi, a lawyer who has advocated on behalf of actors, told the AFP that “the clients I’ve worked with didn’t fully understand what they were agreeing to at the time,” blindly signing contracts with “clauses considered abusive,” even sometimes granting “worldwide, unlimited, irrevocable exploitation, with no right of withdrawal.”
“One major red flag is the use of broad, perpetual and irrevocable language that gives the company full ownership or unrestricted rights to use a creator’s voice, image, and likeness across any medium,” Malchiodi said.
Even a company publicly committed to ethically developing AI avatars and preventing their use in harmful content like Synthesia can’t guarantee that its content moderation will catch everything. A British actor, Connor Yeates, told the AFP that his video was “used to promote Ibrahim Traore, the president of Burkina Faso who took power in a coup in 2022” in violation of Synthesia’s terms.
“Three years ago, a few videos slipped our content moderation partly because there was a gap in our enforcement for factually accurate but polarizing type content or videos with exaggerated claims or propaganda, for example,” said Alexandru Voica, head of Synthesia’s corporate affairs.
Synthesia offers opt-outs, vows to protect actors
For actors who risk AI potentially replacing them in the market, AI avatars could be one path to shore up income and ensure their livelihoods. Since 2023, Synthesia has sold its avatars to about half of Fortune 500 companies, Bloomberg reported, and their business only seems to continue exploding. For brands, the allure of using AI avatars is reducing the time and costs of production for marketing campaigns, so that demand seems unlikely to wane.
