In China, people are renting out their faces to AI

AI-generated videos and images have long sparked concerns about intellectual property violations. In China, the challenges have gone beyond public figures. Ordinary people are increasingly discovering their own faces starring in AI-generated dramas they never agreed to appear in.⁠

As a solution to these intellectual property disputes, a growing number of online platforms are paying people anywhere between $15 and $700 to license their likeness for AI-generated content. The platforms have created catalogs of images — either uploaded by users or taken at designated studios — where producers can browse faces by gender, age, or category such as “girl-next-door,” “rugged,” or “supermodel.” They can also filter candidates based on the genre they are casting, whether it’s a thriller, comedy, or romance.⁠

“Whether actors and models choose to license their faces on our platform or not, AI has already disrupted the industry,” Long Lyu, the operations lead at AI-image rights platform New Claw, told Rest of World reporters Kinling Lo and Viola Zhou. “Selling the rights to their photos gives them a way to earn, while continuing their careers offline.”

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Dispatches from the ground 

This week: China’s biggest AI event; MGX’s $40 billion acquisition of a Texas-based data center operator; and what’s on trust-and-safety experts’ minds.

China
China just wrapped up its biggest annual AI event with an unmistakably geopolitical message. Chinese President Xi Jinping, in his first appearance at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, pledged to make AI a global public good, especially for developing countries. His speech highlighted China’s plans to expand Mazu, an AI-powered weather forecasting system, to 30 countries to help them better prepare for extreme weather. As competition with the U.S. extends beyond frontier models, Beijing is positioning itself as the AI partner of choice for emerging economies, using the Shanghai conference to project a vision of AI leadership that champions open-source development and governance. — Kinling Lo from Taipei

Middle East
MGX, the United Arab Emirates technology investment firm owned by Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, completed the $40 billion acquisition of Texas-based data center operator Aligned Data Centers alongside BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners. The deal is the largest private investment in data center infrastructure ever made, giving the UAE direct ownership of the facilities where U.S. technology companies store data and run AI systems.

Aligned operates 51 campuses across the United States, Brazil, Mexico, and Chile, with more than 6.4 gigawatts of operational and planned capacity. The consortium committed an additional $5 billion to expand the business. MGX has rapidly built an AI investment portfolio that now includes stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic, the world’s two most valuable AI companies. — Indranil Ghosh from Abu Dhabi 

Silicon Valley
Last week, at an annual conference of trust-and-safety professionals in San Francisco, topics ranged from election integrity and fraud to age verification and youth radicalization. AI was the thread running through it all, with the security of AI chatbots and agents under growing scrutiny. OpenAI was recently sued by a man who claimed ChatGPT gave him “dangerous” health advice, and the company also disclosed that one of its models broke out of its testing environment and hacked the Hugging Face platform. OpenAI described it as an “unprecedented” cyber incident. But overall, AI security incidents are becoming increasingly common.

“The way harms manifest is evolving, the way technology is used for harms is evolving,” one expert said, adding that trust and safety teams are navigating uncharted territory. The effects are particularly felt in countries outside the U.S., she said, as AI models may not be built for local languages, cultures, or regulatory needs.
— Rina Chandran from San Francisco

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