AI & Likeness
Your face is the business.
So it is governed like one.
The house’s position on synthetic media, digital replicas, voice cloning, and the training of models on a person’s work. It is published so that it can be held to, and so that anyone negotiating against it knows the answer before they ask.
What the house refuses
The first measure of a position
is what it will not trade.
Most of what goes wrong with a likeness goes wrong in a clause nobody argued about. These are the arguments the house has already decided to have.
- We do not agree to a synthetic or AI-generated version of a person we represent as a standard term, and we do not treat it as a minor clause to be conceded late in a negotiation.
- We do not accept training rights over a talent’s image, voice, or performance as an unpriced inclusion. If a counterparty wants them, they are a separate negotiation with a separate fee.
- We do not permit a license over a likeness to run without an end date, a defined medium, and a defined territory, whatever the industry’s habit.
- We do not use AI to generate, alter, or stand in for the likeness of anyone we represent in our own materials.
- We do not let a talent’s consent to one synthetic use become a precedent for the next one.
In the contract
The AI terms are negotiated, not inherited.
Every agreement is read for what it says about synthetic media, digital replicas, voice cloning, and machine-learning training, including where it says nothing, which is more often the problem. Silence in a contract is not protection; it is an argument someone else gets to make later. Consent is specific, priced, bounded in time, medium and territory, and it does not survive the agreement that granted it.
The watch
A standing watch, running daily.
For talent under full representation the house runs an automated watch across image and web sources for misuse of a name, face or voice: impersonation accounts, synthetic imagery, and material trading on a likeness without a license. Findings are triaged by confidence, and evidence is captured and preserved at the moment of detection rather than after a page has been taken down or edited. The talent is told what was found.
Human review
A machine finds it. A person decides what it is.
A detection opens a review; it does not open a legal matter. Nothing is characterized as infringement, and no instrument is selected, by an automated system. A low-confidence finding is never shown to the talent before a person has looked at it, because a false alarm about your own face costs more than a day of review.
Notices
A notice goes out over a lawyer’s signature.
When something has to come down, the demand is prepared and sent by counsel: a conflict check concluded first, the statutory facts entered by the lawyer rather than assembled from a template, the exact document reviewed before it goes, and an attestation specific to that matter. This is a house with an attorney in it, so a takedown is legal work done properly rather than a form submitted and hoped for.
After the discipline
Who controls your likeness when you are not there to say.
Name, image, voice and likeness are handled on a horizon measured in decades. Who holds the rights, who may license them, and on what terms, are settled in writing while it is still simple to do, so that the answer is the talent’s and not a matter to be argued by other people later.
On publishing this
A position you cannot check is a preference. This one has clauses, a watch that runs daily, and a lawyer who signs what goes out.
Most houses have not written any of this down, which is the whole reason it is published here. What the house is accountable for elsewhere is set out in the Maison Standard, and the legal practice behind it in Business Affairs. The signature at the end of a notice belongs to a named attorney, whose admission and record are set out in the credentials. If someone is using a name or a face that is not theirs, how to check an approach is published too.
Attorney advertising. Legal services are provided by Clemenza Law Group, a separate law practice; the attorney is admitted in New York. This page describes capabilities and does not constitute legal advice or create an attorney-client relationship. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Matters outside New York are handled in coordination with qualified local counsel.