You Are the Asset — Why Protecting Your Voice and Likeness Is No Longer Optional

For years, “protect your name and likeness” sounded like lawyer advice in search of a problem. Abstract. Defensive. Something for movie stars, athletes, and people with endorsement deals.

That era is over.

Today, your voice, your face, your mannerisms, your delivery, and your identity are not just personal attributes. They are usable assets. They can be copied, synthesized, trained on, repackaged, and monetized without your participation.

AI did not create the right of publicity. But it dramatically expanded the number of people who need to understand it.

The basic idea is simple: in many states, people have legal rights controlling commercial use of their name, image, likeness, and other recognizable aspects of identity. Those rights vary significantly by jurisdiction, but the principle predates generative AI by decades.

What changed is the technology.

A creator no longer needs access to a celebrity recording session to imitate a voice. A few minutes of public audio may be enough to build a convincing clone. A synthetic host can imitate cadence, tone, phrasing, and personality without copying any one recording word-for-word.

That creates a legal problem copyright law does not always solve.

Copyright protects creative works. It does not generally give someone ownership over the sound of their natural voice. But courts have long recognized that deliberately imitating a distinctive voice for commercial purposes can create liability under other legal theories.

Bette Midler successfully sued after an advertiser hired a soundalike singer when she refused to participate in a campaign. Tom Waits won a similar case involving an imitation of his distinctive voice. Those cases were decided long before modern voice-cloning systems existed.

AI makes the same conduct easier to produce and harder for audiences to detect.

For broadcasters, podcasters, creators, and talent, the practical question is no longer whether your identity has value.

It is whether you have treated it like something worth protecting.

Contracts should address AI training, synthetic reproduction, voice cloning, digital replicas, posthumous use, sublicensing, and whether recorded performances may be used to create new performances you never actually made.

Talent agreements written before generative AI may say nothing about these issues. That silence can become expensive.

Creators should also think about where their source material lives. Public podcasts, radio archives, livestreams, interviews, audiobooks, and social media provide enormous libraries of voice and likeness data. The fact that content is publicly accessible does not necessarily mean someone has permission to turn the identity inside it into a new commercial product.

The technology is moving faster than legislation, but the underlying legal instinct is familiar.

If the product depends on the audience recognizing you, your identity is part of the product.

And if your identity is part of the product, it deserves to be treated like an asset.

Related Resources

• AI & Digital Rights Resource Center
• Talk Radio in the Age of Deepfake Voices
• When Your Voice Becomes the Product

Originally published by TALKERS on January 26, 2026.