Category: News | Published: 2026-06-09
Generative AI can now produce a convincing video of almost anyone saying almost anything. It can clone a voice from a few seconds of audio. It can animate a still photograph into a moving, speaking likeness. These capabilities have been developing for years, but they have reached a point where the gap between what is real and what is synthesised is no longer reliably visible to the human eye.
For most people, the question of what to do about that has felt abstract. A concern, certainly. But not something with a practical answer.
A new initiative launched in June 2026 is trying to change that. The Human Consent Registry is a free online tool that lets anyone, not just celebrities or public figures, create a formal record of how artificial intelligence systems are and are not permitted to use their name, face, voice, and other personal characteristics. The idea is to give individuals a practical mechanism for AI identity protection that operates at the scale of the internet rather than relying on case-by-case legal agreements.
Who Is Behind It
The registry was developed by RSL Media, which stands for Really Simple Licensing, a non-profit organisation co-founded by the actor and producer Cate Blanchett alongside Nikki Hexum. It was formally launched at the European Parliament in Brussels on 24 June 2026, with Blanchett presenting alongside Bulgarian MEP Eva Maydell, director Steven Soderbergh, and representatives from the entertainment industry.
The initiative has attracted backing from a number of prominent figures including Tom Hanks, Emma Thompson, and Javier Bardem. Creative Artists Agency, one of the largest talent agencies in the world, has also joined as a partner, giving the registry access to professional representation infrastructure on a significant scale.
Speaking at the launch, Blanchett described the rationale plainly: your identity is your intellectual property in the age of AI, and every person deserves the right to decide how AI can or cannot use it.
How the Registry Works
The process of registering is designed to be accessible to anyone, regardless of technical knowledge. RSL Media says the whole thing takes under ten minutes. You provide your legal name, your profession, and at least one publicly verifiable link such as a LinkedIn profile, professional website, or verified social media account. That information is used to confirm your identity without requiring personal documents or complex verification steps.
Once registered, you choose one of three settings for how AI systems may use your identity. The system uses a traffic light framework: green means permitted, amber means conditional use is allowed on terms you specify, and red means prohibited entirely. Those preferences are then converted into a machine-readable Human Consent ID, a unique signal that automated systems can theoretically detect and act on when they encounter your name, image, or likeness online.
The current version of the registry covers name, image, likeness, voice, movement, and other personal attributes. RSL Media has announced that future versions will extend the same framework to creative works, fictional characters, brands, and trademarks, essentially building a suite of consent registries for different categories of intellectual property.
The registry is free to use at rslmedia.org.
It Is Not Just for Famous People
The involvement of well-known names has generated most of the coverage, but the registry is not designed for performers alone. RSL Media is explicit that anyone can register on their own behalf. The system also supports people who work through agents, managers, or licensing organisations, which is intended to give AI companies a practical route for routing permission requests through professional intermediaries rather than approaching individuals directly.
This matters because AI identity protection is not an issue that only affects people whose faces appear on cinema screens. Anyone whose voice, image, or likeness could plausibly be cloned, imitated, or synthesised by AI systems has an interest in being able to communicate their preferences. That category is considerably broader than celebrity performers.
Why Brussels Was the Right Place to Launch
The choice of the European Parliament as the launch venue was deliberate. The Parliament was the institution responsible for negotiating and passing the EU AI Act, which came into force in stages from 2024 and places significant obligations on AI developers around transparency, accountability, and the use of personal data.
Eva Maydell, one of the lead negotiators on the EU AI Act, described the Human Consent Registry as a tool that makes rights transparent, scales trust, and keeps human creativity at the centre of technological progress. Her involvement signals that the registry is being positioned not just as a voluntary industry initiative but as infrastructure that could complement the regulatory framework the Parliament has already built.
The EU AI Act requires high-risk AI systems to maintain documentation of training data and imposes obligations around the use of biometric information. A machine-readable consent registry that allows AI developers to check permissions before using someone's identity fits naturally alongside that regulatory direction, even if the registry itself is not a legal instrument.
What the Registry Cannot Yet Do
It is important to be clear about the limits of what the Human Consent Registry currently offers as an AI identity protection mechanism. Registering your preferences does not automatically prevent AI companies from using your identity. The registry is a publicly accessible record of your wishes, not a legally enforceable injunction.
Its practical effectiveness depends on whether AI developers choose to check it, or are required to do so by regulation. At present, responsible developers may choose to incorporate it into their data governance processes. Others may not. The registry's supporters acknowledge this openly, arguing that creating a single, machine-readable, publicly discoverable record of consent is a necessary first step towards making compliance practical at scale.
The parallel being drawn is to how robots.txt files work for web crawlers. Websites have long been able to signal to search engines which pages they do not want indexed. Most responsible crawlers respect those signals. The Human Consent Registry is attempting to establish a similar norm for AI systems and personal identity, one where the infrastructure for communicating consent exists even before every actor in the ecosystem is legally required to honour it.
What This Means for Businesses
For organisations that use AI to generate marketing content, customer-facing communications, training materials, or multimedia assets, the Human Consent Registry raises questions worth thinking about now rather than later.
AI tools capable of generating synthetic voices, digital likenesses, and realistic video are increasingly within reach of businesses of any size. The question of whether the identities being used, whether of real employees, public figures, or individuals whose data has been used in training, have been appropriately licensed is becoming a practical compliance question rather than a theoretical one.
The broader lesson from initiatives like this is that AI governance is expanding beyond data privacy and cyber security into questions of digital identity and personal consent. Businesses that establish clear internal policies around how they use AI-generated content, and what permissions they verify before doing so, will be better placed as that regulatory landscape continues to develop.
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