AI, Likeness Rights and the Battle for Control in the Digital Age
The collision between artificial intelligence and the entertainment industry is creating a new kind of Wild West, one where an actor’s face, body, and voice can be replicated, reanimated, or reused without them ever stepping onto a set. As studios increasingly rely on digital doubles, the legal and ethical boundaries around ownership and consent are being stretched to breaking point.
In a recent interview, The Bottom Line host Evan Davis spoke with actress Olivia Williams, known for The Crown and The Wheel of Time, about the alarming clauses buried in many standard acting contracts. Williams describes a world where producers can claim ownership of an actor’s “likeness … throughout the universe in perpetuity,” a phrase that sounds absurd until you realise how casually it’s used. Beneath the legal jargon lies a profound question: when technology can recreate a human being, who gets to decide what that person does, says, or sells?
Williams’ candid reflections reveal a power imbalance baked into modern contracts. Actors are told to sign or be replaced. They are scanned, sometimes in costume, sometimes barely clothed, inside 360-degree rigs that capture every detail of their face and body. These scans, she explains, can then be used to build digital replicas, often stored indefinitely and outside the performer’s control. The problem is not just ownership but permanence. Once your digital double exists, can you ever truly delete it?
Her warning touches on more than performer rights; it is about human agency in the age of AI. The industry’s boilerplate contracts, originally designed for posters and action figures, now govern the capture of biometric data and digital identities. Without reform, the tools that allow actors to finish scenes when they fall ill could just as easily be used to resurrect them without consent, or even after death.
Interview: AI and the Law – Owning Your Digital Likeness
Evan Davis (ED): The subject of AI and the law. It sounds like a rather dry legal conference, but there are some intriguing questions about whether it’s time to iron out one or two awkward areas. Here’s one: Am I allowed to use an AI-created replica of someone else to make a film or advertise my product? What exactly are the rules?
Now, one actress, Olivia Williams, who starred in The Wheel of Time and The Crown, has written an essay explaining her dissatisfaction with current, standard contracts for acting work. She thinks they’d give way too much power to producers to scan actors’ bodies and use the template for whatever they want. I spoke to her earlier and asked her, what was the clause in her contracts that made her nervous?
Olivia Williams (OW): The following words: “the producer owns your likeness as determined by the producer on all platforms now existing or yet to be devised throughout the universe in perpetuity.” And that means the producer owns what they decide the word likeness means, so that could be a plastic figurine, it could be a poster, it could be a drawing, or it could be your biometric data, or it could be a digital replica of you. And they own it on any platform—that means Blu-ray, DVD, VHS, Betamax, or a hologram on Mars—and they own it throughout the universe in perpetuity. Perpetuity means forever and ever and ever. Which, to me, is the sort of language that a slightly facile ten-year-old might use when they’re trying to say that my daddy’s bigger than your daddy.
ED: But let’s just be clear why that clause is there, because the purpose of that clause is that they can use your picture in a poster, or maybe recreate your role if you’re sick for a day and they need to retake something. And that’s what I would assume that clause is for.
OW: Yes, so let’s not be mean about this. Actors want to be in the movie, and they want to be on the poster, and you spend a lot of your time asking to be in the poster, asking to be bigger on the poster, and have your name higher up on the poster. And all those things are great. If I get ill, which I am all the time—I have a permanent case of neuroendocrine cancer—I’d love for the movie to be finished if I can’t do it.
That doesn’t mean that I want the producers to own my biometric data throughout the universe in perpetuity. It means that I want them to be able to use any scan that they’ve spent a lot of money taking, in the reasonable band of what I’d have agreed to or what I would agree to. But what I don’t like is that they cannot guarantee that they can secure my digital replica safely. They cannot, I don’t believe, delete it. Have you ever tried to delete something from your computer or any of your social media? You’ll realize how difficult it is. And instead of trying to think of ways they might be able to secure it or delete it, they just say “we own it.”
ED: So just tell me about the scans though. So you’ve agreed to a film. There’s a legitimate question about maybe having a scan so the day you can’t make the filming they can still use you. But what forms does a scan take? I mean, I didn’t know people are having scans for this kind of stuff. Usually you’re in costume, you’re on set.
OW: This makes you a very helpless person. The reason you see pictures of actors having their shoelaces tied for them and people holding cups up to their lips is because when you’re in costume they really don’t want you touching or holding or or doing anything that might damage the costume or make it but you have to go back into hair and make up half an hour. So you’re standing around. Sometimes you can’t have a phone with you. You can’t do anything.
And then they say, “while you’re in costume, could you just pop along to the special effects guys are here today?” They might be here in a in a big truck or they might have set up in a separate studio or a room, and they’ve set up a circle of over 300 cameras in columns. So they go about 12 feet high and in a 360-degree circle. You stand in the middle of the circle, usually in costume, but I’ve known actors stand in their pants. And all the cameras go off at once. And then sometimes you’re—you sign something, and because of the light it’s so blinding you, and I don’t know any actors who read small print—but you sign it, and then you go away and the producer owns your likeness as defined by the producer throughout the universe in perpetuity.
ED: What do you want to happen? What should what should happen? You obviously don’t like this clause which is which is too sweeping. I mean, you could just negotiate. I mean, what, just say “I’m not signing that clause.”
OW: I’m so happy you live in an idyll where you get to negotiate your contracts! Actors don’t. What happens is you’re offered the job and if you have any objections to anything in the contract then they move on.
ED: Is it really that tough?
OW: Yes. And I’m putting my head above the parapet because the job I’m in in the moment, they can’t recast me. It’s the only millisecond in my life when I have any leverage. I’m already on film and they can’t afford to replace me.
ED: Olivia Williams there on the worrying aspects of contracts that Hollywood actors have and the little glimpses into the life of Hollywood stars.
AI is not the villain here. Ambiguous contracts are. Technology can preserve creativity, continuity, and even performance itself. But when legal language grants eternal and universal ownership of a person’s likeness, the line between artistry and exploitation becomes dangerously blurred. Olivia Williams’ outspokenness may mark a turning point, urging performers and lawmakers to define ethical standards for the digital age.
The question remains: as the boundary between human and digital performance fades, will artists retain the right to control their own image, or will they become ghosts in someone else’s machine?
Acting
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