Identity Is the New Piracy. Will You Get Paid For Your Likeness?
Loti AI’s Luke Arrigoni explains the next phase is royalties, not just takedowns
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Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise never had a fistfight amid the concrete ruins of a vaguely L.A.-like city — yet, thanks to ByteDance’s AI video model Seedance 2.0, millions of people have watched it.
The video wasn’t just a viral curiosity. It was a preview.
For two decades, Hollywood’s existential fight was piracy — stolen movies, ripped DVDs, torrent sites siphoning off revenue. Now the threat isn’t just stolen content, it’s stolen identity: face, voice and likeness.
The Seedance meltdown — another familiar cycle of AI launch, industry outrage and partial retreat after ByteDance added guardrails — landed not long after Disney announced a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI and licensed 200 animated characters to Sora. In other words: While one side of the industry is scrambling to take fake videos down, the other was negotiating how to put real IP into the ghost machines and get paid.
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That felt like a pivot. Enforcement is no longer just about stopping theft in a game of whack-a-mole, but about building the tollbooths when someone takes NIL (name, image, likeness) rights without paying.
Among the companies racing to build that infrastructure is Loti AI, whose clients range from A-list actors to military generals to the estates of Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein. Working with partners including CAA, WME and CMG Worldwide, Loti sits at the intersection of defense and monetization: detecting deepfakes, issuing up to tens of thousands of takedown requests a day — and quietly preparing for the moment when licensing and royalties become automated. (Erik Barmack’s list of 8 AI companies doing things the right way features Loti along with Vermillio, the other Hollywood go-to in managing digital likeness and intellectual property rights in the AI age.)
“As humans, we have been slowly adapting to a false reality,” Loti AI CEO Luke Arrigoni tells me. “Being able to hit a button and generate a video where even the people in it aren’t real is the next evolution.”
Today Arrigoni explains:
Why people are going to “make a ton of money in the next six months” on both the talent and platform side from AI likeness
Which platforms are winning — and losing — the deepfake takedown race (with exclusive response-rate data from TikTok to Pinterest)
How scammers game the gray areas to keep fake celebrity accounts alive
Why Meta has a crisis fast-lane, which world events trigger the most scams — and what happens when platforms say no
The uncomfortable truth about YouTube’s Content ID
What talent, agents and studios should be doing right now to protect (and monetize) name, image and likeness
Where AI protections could become a flashpoint in SAG-AFTRA’s next negotiation
Why Disney’s OpenAI deal isn’t just licensing but a blueprint for how royalties may flow in the AI era