Celebrity likeness endorsement via blockchain NFTs
2024-05-26 17:55:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
There's been somewhat of a big scandal in the world of AI over the past week. The whole drama is around OpenAI's use of Scarlet Johansen's voice as the voice of their latest AI chatbot. It seems they didn't get permission from Scarlet, and apparently found another actor with a very similar but different voice. Scarlet is suing them over it. The best coversge I've listenned to has been on the latest All-in podcast, and the latest Talk Show podcast, if you want all the details.
One interesting point made by Chamath on the All-in episode is that the real thing that's important here is the celebrity endorsement of the use of their likeness. That's what is ultimately valuable. Scarlet's fans want to know it's her voice but also that she was into the project enough to allow them to use her voice.
Why not then, I wonder, have some modern way of doing that? Ideally it would help to create a bit of buzz about the project in question. It sounds a lot to me like an NFT, or perhaps a slighlty custom NFT might provide the necessary assurances that the project was endorsed by a specific celebrity. Whether it's an NFT the represents the project or one that represents the celebrity's likeness, I'm not sure exactly, but theoretically you should be able to create some artifact and a flow where the celebrity sign off with their private key, proving the validity of the endorsement.
One could imagine other conditions being attached to such an endorsement NFT, like expiry date, or custom remunerstion details. All sorts if interesting things might be possible, even things that in some way involved the fans.
Just an idea I thought could be interesting.