In the age of generative AI, the most valuable commodity is no longer just your data; it is your Digital Likeness—your voice, your face, your artistic or performative style. AI’s ability to replicate, customize, and deploy synthetic versions of individuals has transformed personal identity into a quantifiable, highly valuable Asset Class, forcing a reckoning with control, ownership, and monetization.This episode explores the three pillars of the synthetic persona economy:

• The Valuation Crisis: We examine how generative AI tools (deepfakes, voice cloning) can create infinite, scalable commercial assets from a single human source (Source 1.1). Actors, musicians, and public figures now face a market where their synthetic doppelgängers can replace their labor, demanding that they establish legal control over this new, replicable asset (Source 1.4).
• The Right of Publicity Fight: Because current copyright law protects works but not likeness or style, individuals are pushing for new legal frameworks, notably the expansion of the Right of Publicity. This legal strategy asserts that the commercial value derived from a person’s identity is property, giving them the explicit right to authorize or restrict its use in AI training and synthetic media production (Source 2.3, 4.3).
• Monetization and Control: We look at emerging business models where individuals can actively license their digital likeness (e.g., an actor licensing their voice for video game NPCs) or use cryptographic methods to track, watermark, and prove the provenance of their authentic content versus AI copies (Source 3.4).

The creation of the synthetic persona asset class is fundamentally challenging the idea of individual autonomy. The future requires robust legal and technological controls to ensure people, not algorithms, decide who profits from their identity.

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