Who owns and manages your digital twin?

We already see how digital twins sing, model and appear in videos. But we are in the early phase, how to manage the copyrights and get fair compensation to all parties. This is a question about privacy, digital rights and copyrights. iNZDR builds a platform that enables any superstar, influencer and in the future anyone to manage their own digital assets, including their digital twins.

Digital Twins already make business

We have seen many examples of how AI can generate new music based on someone’s style or voice. There are quite impressive examples in that video, not only recreating similar music but also making new music with the voice of a young Paul McCartney or John Lennon. These are illustrative examples of how AI is not just generating new content from old but also using personal data to produce it.

Another example is where brands can hire a supermodel’s digital twin, in this case, Eva Herzigová, for campaigns. It is basically a digitized version of her that can then be used to create new content. This creates opportunities for brands, but it also raises many questions.

Copyright questions are emerging

Regulators and lawmakers have woken up to this situation, but the reality is that laws and regulations always follow technology development, not lead it. Emerging AI tools are opening new business opportunities and solutions like this, and copyright owners will need to manage not only their personal content but also versions modified by AI. The appearance, voice or other characteristics of stars like this involves their own biometric data.

The EU and US are working to clarify which rules apply to generative AI content and what kind of new legislation is needed, and the EU has worked with a specific new regulation for AI. There are also legal cases about use of data to train AI models, for example, the case between the New York Times and OpenAI.

So, one aspect is to find models that help to define copyright ownerships of works co-created with AI tools, but it is also to better categorize different ‘assets’ and their copyrights. For example, we can have a singer who produces songs and works with a record label. This record label may own the copyright of the songs, and the singer gets compensation based on their contract and role in creating the song.

Music artists get compensations, similar is needed for other copyrights

But the same singer has a personal voice, appearance and certain characteristics. The singer can also give interviews, make comments and make public appearances. These can be used for the generative AI, too, to create characters, singing and new content. But the copyright cannot be based only on the models used for the singer’s songs. The same applies to sports stars, actors and models; they also have their personal data. Now, we have digital twins to contend with. Generative AI has enabled services that can learn from an individual’s behavior, style and character and start to act like that individual. It means all of us can have a personal or digital twins and personal AI that behaves and even sounds like us. How these superstars, celebrities, talents and influencers can manage their own data and their digital twins? We have been worried about personal data in social media. With digital clones, we can discuss much more serious issues. It’s not just that someone knows about you and can target you in all kinds of marketing campaigns or if you have published something dumb.

Regulation is good, but you need a real solution to do it

One area that could potentially help navigate this rapidly evolving space is the copyright law or data privacy regulations that deal with digital and biometric data. It is an area that also requires clear regulatory and legal guidelines and services where copyright licensing can be done legally. Many copyright and image rights questions are especially for well-known people where brands, media and AI content companies pay for them to use their data, whether it is voice, physical appearance or something else.

These potential problems are not only linked to laws and regulations. We also know the laws are not enough, we also use really working business models and services to license and tract use.

In practice, it can be complex for the star or anyone managing personal copyrights. If you are a star, would you like to license your data to digital marketing with generative AI? How do you it? You can hire a law firm to consider such an opportunity and prepare an agreement, but this is very slow and expensive, especially if there are many small campaigns or services where it could be used. The digital age needs digital solutions for this.

This is the area iNZDR has been built. Our aim is to offer the best tools to anyone to manage, license and tract their own digital assets and their copyrights. We want to offer the best platform to do this. We already work with our pilot customers, and soon it will be available to many more users.