Your Face, Generated

In 1953, a federal judge ruled on a dispute over bubble gum cards and invented something new in law: the right of publicity, the idea that a face is property one can license or withhold. Your Face, Generated opens with that precedent to show how generative AI quietly dissolved it, by extracting a face's mathematics instead of copying its pixels. The book follows a Portland photographer who discovered his own likeness, down to the droop of one eyelid, generated inside an AI image of a stranger in a forest he never visited, and traces why no copyright takedown notice could touch it, since nothing had been copied. A Chicago litigator explains why the right of publicity, built for billboards and trading cards, breaks down against a model that sold nothing, just generated pixels. Drawing on the 118-day SAG-AFTRA strike of 2023, which won background actors a minimum two-hundred-sixteen-dollar rate for having their faces scanned and binding consent for every future use, it shows the first real template for licensing a digital likeness instead of losing it outright. Discover why reclaiming a face means treating it as property licensed on your own terms, not raw material anyone can scrape for free.