The Monetization of Identity in the Age of AI

When I previously wrote about deepfakes and the economic exploitation of another person’s image, the central question was: for how much longer will personal attributes continue to be used free of charge in an increasingly sophisticated digital environment?

Now, singer Taylor Swift’s recent decision to seek trademark registration of her own voice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), in response to the rise of generative artificial intelligence, extends far beyond the entertainment industry and raises broader legal questions with significant economic, regulatory, and institutional implications.

If the debate previously revolved around the unauthorized use of one’s image, we have now moved into a more complex stage: the attempt to transform elements of personal identity into legally organized assets that are capable of control, exclusivity, and systematic monetization. This distinction is far from trivial.

In the context of deepfakes, the core issue is the unauthorized appropriation of image and voice, often occurring in a decentralized manner that is difficult to prevent or remedy. Traditional legal responses, grounded in the personality rights established in Articles 11 through 21 of the Brazilian Civil Code, have frequently proven insufficient in light of the speed and scale of such violations.

However, Swift’s initiative—supported by the fact that the USPTO previously granted a similar registration to actor Matthew McConaughey—changes the framework of the discussion. Instead of merely reacting to unauthorized uses, the objective is to anticipate the problem by structuring protection within the logic of intellectual property law.

This is precisely where the attempt to register a voice as a trademark becomes relevant. When analyzed under Brazilian law, the issue encounters a significant obstacle: the Brazilian Industrial Property Law (Law No. 9,279/1996) requires trademarks to be “visually perceptible” under Article 122, thereby excluding sound marks from Brazil’s trademark registration system. Nonetheless, the initiative reveals a sophisticated strategy of shifting from the defensive protection of personality rights toward the proactive framework of industrial property rights.

In practical terms, this means moving away from a model based on subsequent compensation and toward a model centered on prior control and organized economic exploitation.

This shift in behavior demonstrates an increasingly evident asymmetry between those who generate value—such as singers, actors, and holders of image, voice, and identity rights—and those who capture that value, including digital platforms, AI developers, and other economic actors. The novelty is that some rights holders have begun acting not only reactively, through litigation, but also proactively and strategically.

Yet this transformation gives rise to new dilemmas. On the one hand, recognizing proprietary rights over one’s voice could serve as an effective mechanism to prevent unauthorized uses. On the other hand, it expands the logic of private appropriation over existential attributes, causing identity to evolve from a protected personal interest into a structured portfolio of assets.

Such a development raises questions regarding the very foundations of personality rights, which have traditionally been understood as inalienable, non-waivable, and non-economic in nature.

Although the economic exploitation of personality rights has long been accepted, their conversion into structures resembling traditional private property raises an important question: to what extent is it desirable—or legally sustainable—to treat elements of human identity as commercially exploitable monopolies?

The issue also intersects with the Brazilian General Data Protection Law (LGPD – Law No. 13,709/2018), considering that vocal patterns may qualify as biometric data. This expands the discussion beyond ownership and intellectual property, bringing it into the realms of privacy, informational self-determination, and digital security.

The lack of coordinated legal responses may create a paradoxical scenario: while technology rapidly advances in its ability to replicate human identity, the law oscillates between traditional legal instruments and improvised solutions.

Taylor Swift’s initiative does not solve the problem, but it highlights a fundamental issue: if the human voice can be captured, cloned, and monetized by machines, the law will eventually need to decide whether it will continue to treat voice merely as an expression of personhood or whether it will explicitly recognize its hybrid nature—personal, economic, and technological at the same time.