Generating a recognisable person's face or voice raises a question that no single body of law was written to answer. What exists instead is a patchwork that is settling into a workable shape.
Which existing rights get used
Publicity and personality rights protect commercial use of a person's identity, and they apply whether the likeness was photographed or generated.
Defamation covers depictions that make false factual claims, and privacy law covers intimate imagery, both of which reach a meaningful share of the harmful cases.
The gaps are the uses that are neither commercial nor defamatory nor intimate, which is where most of the disputes now sit.
Why consent is doing the heavy lifting
Contracts have moved faster than legislation, because parties can agree terms without waiting for anyone.
Performance agreements now routinely specify whether a likeness may be scanned, for which productions, for how long and with what approval over new uses.
The important clauses are the narrow ones. A broad grant signed once can authorise uses the signer never contemplated, and duration is the term that matters most.
How the deceased complicate it
Rights in a person's likeness after death vary considerably between jurisdictions, and some recognise them for decades while others end them immediately.
Estates therefore hold meaningful control in some places and none in others, for the same person and the same use.
This variation is why productions involving historical figures depend heavily on where the work is made and distributed rather than on any general principle.
Why platform policy moves first
Platforms set enforceable rules immediately, and their policies reach further than most statutes because they operate across borders.
Common requirements now include disclosure of synthetic depictions of real people, removal on request from the depicted individual, and outright prohibition for certain categories such as election content.
Enforcement is uneven and the rules change without notice, which makes platform policy the fastest-moving and least predictable part of the picture.
Where the settled position is emerging
A rough consensus has formed around three elements: the depicted person should have consented, the depiction should be disclosed, and the person should be able to have it removed.
Disagreement concentrates on the exceptions, particularly satire, commentary and news, where a consent requirement would remove protections that predate any of this.
That tension is unlikely to resolve cleanly, because the same technique produces both the political cartoon and the fabricated confession, and no rule distinguishes them by the method used.