The stakes
Your face is not a style. Your voice is not a preset.
AI disagrees. To a generative model, a face is a distribution and a voice is a waveform, and both can be worn by anyone with a prompt. The technology that lets a creator be everywhere at once is the same technology that lets an impostor be them anywhere at all.
Most platforms respond with a report button and a prayer. We think likeness needs what property has always needed: a system — one that answers four questions in order. Whose is it? Is someone else using it? What happens when they are? And how does legitimate use work?
Verify: prove it’s you
Ownership starts with a verified claim. Identity verification on myOrbit proves you are you, and attaches that proof to your name, image, and likeness — the creators page calls this protecting exactly those three things, in exactly those words.
This step is unglamorous and non-optional. A protection system without verified claims is a lost-and-found: full of valuables, no way to prove which is yours. Verification converts “that looks like me” — an argument — into “that is my registered likeness” — a fact with a timestamp.
One registration covers the faces you actually use: your own likeness, your alter egos, your original characters. A creator’s cast is part of the creator.
Detect: find the misuse
A claim nobody checks against is a plaque on a wall. So the second layer is detection: continuous monitoring that spots unauthorized avatars wearing a protected face or name, wherever on the platform they surface.
The word continuous is the substance. Impersonation isn’t an event; it’s a background rate — new accounts, new avatars, new uploads, every hour. Protection that depends on the victim personally stumbling onto their double, filing a form, and waiting is not protection. It’s an apology process. Detection makes the platform the one doing the looking.
Enforce: with warning, not in silence
When detection finds something, enforcement follows — and how enforcement behaves is where a platform shows its character.
Silent takedowns are the industry’s bad habit: content vanishes, nobody learns anything, and honest mistakes are punished identically to fraud. Our enforcement is built to warn before it removes where good faith is plausible — a notice, a grace period to comply or contest, then removal that sticks if the answer is silence or defiance. Bad-faith impersonation gets no such courtesy.
Authority stays with the person it’s about. Remove infringing content — your likeness, your call, no bureaucracy. Grace periods make enforcement fair. Retained authority makes it real.
License: the door that opens
Everything so far is a wall. The fourth layer is a door, and it’s the one we care most about.
Boxing your ID means no one uses your likeness without your explicit permission — but with your permission is a business. A brand wants your avatar as its spokesperson. A community wants your character at its event. Licensing turns each of those from theft-you-didn’t-catch into a deal you chose: your terms, your consent on record, revenue flowing to you.
This is the future the walls exist to protect. Detection and enforcement don’t just stop losses — they make your likeness scarce enough to be worth paying for. Nobody licenses what they can freely steal.
What other platforms can use today
One piece of this system is live beyond myOrbit right now, and it’s the only developer claim on our developers page that wears a “Live” pill rather than a “Coming” one: the IP Protection API.
Any platform can call it before minting an AI character: send a name, face, or voice, and learn whether it’s protected — and, when it is, whether a license path exists and where. Self-serve keys, minutes to integrate.
We shipped this door first, and the order is the message. Likeness protection can’t stop at our property line, because impersonation won’t. The claims live here; the checking is for everyone.
Ownership, upgraded
The pre-AI internet already took faces and voices without asking — it just did it retail, one stolen photo at a time. Generative AI made it wholesale. There’s no going back to obscurity as a defense.
The way forward is to make ownership machine-readable: verified claims, always-on detection, enforcement that warns before it strikes, and licensing that pays the person the likeness belongs to. Your face and your voice were always yours. Now that has infrastructure.