Bruce Willis sold the rights to his deepfake self to a firm called Deepcake. From now on, when you want a de-aged version of Bruce to appear in your project, they are the people to see.
I hope they paid an ungodly sum of money to Bruce. What happens when another AI tool does a better job than Deepcake? Bruce has now cut the firm in for a piece of all of his future deepfake appearances. Bad idea… unless the money is crazy good, in which case it’s only a kinda bad idea.
No one has a lock on this tech. There are several open source versions, and improvements are happening at an exponential rate.
This probably won’t stop agents and managers from buying and selling rights, but since the tech isn’t exclusive to any one company or patent holder, hijinks are sure to ensue.
As an aside, this is an unusual (albeit very narrow) case of IP law being adequate for a specific emerging tech. Bruce owns Bruce, no matter the form factor.
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it.