In China, people are renting out their faces to AI
Rest of World Kinling Lo and Viola Zhou ● Covered by 2 sources
In China, people are literally renting out their faces so AI can put them in dramas and ads. Prices run $15 to $700, but the fine print on what happens to your face next is often a blank.
Based on reporting by Rest of World, Kinling Lo and Viola Zhou — read the original for the full story.
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China's booming microdrama industry has spawned an odd new gig economy: face licensing. Platforms like New Claw and ActID let ordinary people, models, and influencers upload photos of themselves into searchable catalogs, tagged by age, gender, and vibe — think "girl-next-door" or "rugged" — so producers can pick a face the way they'd pick a stock photo. Prices range from 99 to 500 yuan per episode on ActID, and New Claw has set a 500-yuan floor to stop users from racing each other to the bottom.
The timing isn't an accident. More than 95% of the 128,000 microdramas released in China during the first quarter of this year used AI somewhere in production, according to industry data cited by Rest of World. That shift gutted traditional production work fast — New Claw itself used to be a production house before pivoting entirely to licensing once ad budgets, including from luxury brands, started flowing toward AI-generated content instead. Operations lead Long Lyu put it bluntly: AI has already disrupted the industry whether performers opt in or not, so licensing at least gives them a cut.
But the arrangement is messier than a simple stock-photo transaction. ByteDance's AI drama platform Hongguo got caught using two influencers' faces without consent in a minidrama that racked up 40 million views before getting pulled; the company says it has removed more than 85,000 videos involving unauthorized face or voice cloning since the start of 2026 alone. Beijing's Internet Court ruled in March that unauthorized AI face-swapping is illegal even when the image has been altered, a decision state media are treating as a legal benchmark. The Guangzhou Internet Court, meanwhile, has processed roughly 700 face-theft cases over three years.
Model Xu Fang, who's currently suing a fashion brand for using his likeness without permission, says he'd never sell his face rights precisely because he has no idea what AI might eventually do with them. Lawyer Yile Deng backs that instinct: many licensing contracts pay just a few dozen dollars for facial data while leaving the scope of use deliberately vague, so sellers often can't say who ends up using their face or why. Once biometric data lands in one of these marketplaces, she notes, meaningful long-term control over it tends to evaporate.
And there's a cost-driven undercurrent running through all of it. Director Wendi Ma says some productions license real faces just to avoid the uncanny, overly-AI look that's drawn viewer complaints about homogeneous characters — Hongguo even pledged in July to crack down on repetitive AI faces. But most minidramas still skip real faces entirely, because fully synthetic characters are simply cheaper. Licensing a face, in other words, isn't a moral compromise for these platforms — it's a line item.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what happens when biometric data gets treated as a spot market instead of a right: people sell their faces for the price of a nice dinner while the contracts stay deliberately vague about downstream use. China's court rulings are ahead of the market here, which is rare, but a legal precedent doesn't stop a platform from quietly reselling your face into a training set three years from now. The real lesson for everyone watching from outside China is that "consent" and "a few dollars and a vague PDF" are not the same thing, no matter how tidy the catalog UI looks.
Read more about this at: Rest of World