Producing an advertisement with a deceased celebrity once required an expensive, rare, and exceptional technical trick. Teams had to find archive footage, negotiate with the person’s heirs, and have CGI specialists work for months. Now, with video generation models such as the recently introduced Seedance Pro 2, it is possible to carry a consistent face, voice, and performance from scene to scene. A script is implemented and an entirely new performance is produced. This leap from the era of short clips toward feature-length productions is rewriting not only cinema but also advertising, politics, news, and reputation.

Bringing a deceased actor back to the screen may initially look like an intellectual property issue. Will the heirs give permission? Who holds the rights to archival footage? What is the licensing fee? Even if the law appears to offer limited protection for the personality rights of the deceased, the ethical question is sharper: would that person have said these words while alive, lent their face to this product, or wanted to appear in this scene? An heir’s signature is not a substitute for a person’s autonomy, even after death. If an AI model makes someone say things they never said, we should stop speaking merely of the use of a creative work and start talking about the exploitation of identity. Respect for memory, the obligation to be truthful to the public, and social trust are undermined at the same time.

The threshold should be even higher for living performers. Showing a person in other scenes and contexts without their will and consent reduces their face and voice to raw material. This is not merely a contractual omission; it may amount to a violation of personality rights, a data-protection breach, and, in some circumstances, a matter for criminal law. More importantly, if this practice becomes normalized, everyone’s public image becomes a potentially open-source body. What happens to celebrities today may happen to ordinary citizens tomorrow. A voice taken from an old interview could be turned into thousands of fake advertisements in a single day.

That is why the issue is not simply a copyright dispute between ByteDance and Disney. Hollywood’s concerns are surely not limited to lost income. SAG-AFTRA has been warning for years about the risks of unauthorized digital replicas. Once a performance can be copied, bargaining power changes as well. Meanwhile, viewers’ instinct to believe what they see is steadily eroded.

The solution is not some magical ban, but a rigorous framework. For living people, consent should be explicit, narrowly scoped, and revocable. For the deceased, in the absence of clear authorization given during their lifetime, no new statements or advertisements should be fabricated in their name. Advertisements should clearly disclose synthetic representations to their audiences. The production pipeline should be traceable: which source was used, what transformation was performed, and which approvals were obtained? More stringent safeguards are needed in sensitive areas such as politics, healthcare, and finance. As Türkiye’s Personal Data Protection Authority (KVKK) and the courts take the data and personality-rights dimensions seriously, the law must also define the boundaries of this new reality regime through transparency and labeling standards.

In the post-truth era, societies will pay the highest price if they lose confidence in reality altogether. The time when we could simply say “Should I believe my own eyes?” is coming to an end.