NEW YORK CITY, NY – From recycled film clips to AI-generated tributes, the reuse of legacy material has become increasingly pervasive. What was once the domain of costly visual effects is now scalable: voices, faces, and behavioral patterns can be replicated with relative ease.
Alongside this capability, legal ambiguity has expanded. If a person can be digitally “brought back” and used across contexts, who has the authority to decide how that likeness is used?
Against this backdrop, IEEE/P2048.121 — Standard for General Technical Requirements for Service-oriented Digital Humans Based on Artificial Intelligence, drafted with participation from Shinshot Media Inc., begins to address the issue. By incorporating questions around human likeness, the standard moves beyond a purely technical framework into usage norms and compliance boundaries.
A persistent grey area is the treatment of deceased individuals. Advances in multimodal generation have removed most technical barriers to recreating a person’s image, voice, and mannerisms. What began as restoration in film production has expanded into commercial and social media use, where “digital resurrection” is increasingly repeatable.
Legal and ethical frameworks, however, lag behind. In many jurisdictions, posthumous publicity rights — including ownership, authorization, and duration — remain insufficiently defined in AI contexts. Traditional distinctions between image rights, copyright, and personality rights blur when applied to highly realistic, interactive digital humans.
The result is a widening gap: as technology advances, the potential for misuse grows in parallel. Shinshot Media’s involvement reflects its position at the intersection of film and AI. With experience in film distribution and digital content, the company has encountered recurring questions around likeness rights. While the film industry operates under relatively mature contractual frameworks, these are now being tested as AI enables replication at scale.
The limitations of traditional licensing are increasingly clear. Agreements designed for one-to-one use struggle to contain near-infinite reproduction, where small datasets can be reused across multiple contexts.
This is prompting a shift: beyond contractual enforcement, the industry is beginning to embed safeguards at the level of technical standards and system design.
More broadly, disputes over digital likeness are part of a wider restructuring of content rights in the AI era, where the balance between efficiency and individual rights is becoming a long-term challenge.
In this context, standards act as an intermediary layer—establishing technical foundations across systems while constraining risk as legal frameworks evolve.
Media Contact
- Daniel Wu
- Silverline PR Group
- danielwu@silverlinepr.com
