A Human Reaction to Protecting Our Identity and Likeness from AI Usage

Cate Blanchett launched the Human Consent Registry, a free online tool that we recommend all our artists and startup friends to look into.

Deepfakes. A.I.-driven Reels (that are quietly killing the Instagram algortihm for REAL reel creators). How you can sell out your inventory with A.I this and that-- it's a helluva lot of notifications.

A lot of headspace taken.

There's a lot of chatter and perpetually growing distrust, anger and aggravation--particularly in my personal experience--from creatives and musicians I work with on a daily basis.

It was, I suppose, just a mater of time until someone simply stands up to the lack of legislation around it to start something.

And it's no small thing. . Academy Award-winning actress Cate Blanchett launched the online tool, known as the Human Consent Registry, through her non-profit organisation, RSL Media. She officially introduced the project at the European Parliament on 26 June 2026.

The tool was created by RSL Media, a nonprofit co-founded by Blanchett. It allows you to control how AI companies, developers, and platforms scrape or use your name, image, voice, and movement. 

How the Registry Works

The goal is to protect our identity and Likeness from AI Usage

The platform acts like a digital traffic light for your personal intellectual property. You create a free account and assign one of three consent levels to your identity: 

• 🔴 Prohibited: AI models cannot use your likeness at all.

• 🟡 Permitted with Terms: AI models can use your likeness, but only if they agree to your specific conditions or rules.

• 🟢 Permitted: AI models have full permission to use your likeness. 
  

The Result

Once you set your rules, the system gives you a unique Human Consent ID. AI developers can check this registry to see what they are legally and ethically allowed to do with your data before they train their systems on it. 

The Tipping Point

The initiative fits into longstanding debates about AI models that use people’s identities or work without permission. Creatives such as authors, composers and writers have been up in arms since the tech went mainstream, suing AI giants like OpenAI and calling for new rules to at least force them to the negotiating table.

“The idea that a person’s identity can simply be extracted, copied, and read, deployed by a machine without their permission, is not only a technical question. It is a moral one,” Blanchett said on Tuesday last week.

The Australian actress was flanked by American creative figures, including director Steven Soderbergh, another Oscar winner, and musician Nick Hexum, as well as European lawmaker Eva Maydell.

Blanchett praised the EU’s AI Act for protecting people and argued that Europe had shown that innovation and rights could coexist.

“Consent is not an obstacle to creativity. Accountability is not an obstacle to progress,” she argued.

Will it work?

To be clear: This is not enforcement tech. It does not technically stop an AI company from scraping someone’s likeness or generating a synthetic version of them. But it is also not just a random public list. It is closer to a machine-readable consent layer: a way to encode who the person is, what rights apply, what is allowed, and what is not.

That distinction matters because a lot of AI safety and AI rights conversations assume that once we write down a rule, systems will follow it.

The hard part is not only writing down the rule. The hard part is making sure autonomous systems check the right signal, interpret it correctly, carry it through the pipeline, and respect it before the irreversible final step happens. That feels like where a lot of AI infrastructure is headed: not just better models, but better machinery around intent, consent, provenance, and consequences.

So it's not a magic forcefield.

But it's a start. And actually, it's about time it starts.

In many ways, complacency and accepting status quo are the biggest antitheses to change.

A registry will not solve all the problems overnight. But every standard starts somewhere. And standards have a way of making people culpable to some extent--- maybe one day the EU's AI Act can become law.

A few of us in Front Page News HQ have gone through the steps. This isn't just for artists and musicians, it's for anyone who is a digital creator, a startup, a thinker and a doer. If you have found yourself, as I have, in the midst of yet another conversation about how much Spotify sucks, and how it's maddening that they culled music believed to have "used AI to promote it" and yet they willfully promote AI created music...it may be time to have conversations about this Human Content Registry initiative.

You can find the project and register your preferences on the RSL Media website. 

Look into it. This is a conversation well past the fear-filled Sci-fi depictions of iRobot, Terminator's V.I.KI. and The Matrix. It's taking the first step, I'd say, and a stand worth taking.

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