A 22-year-old Australian footballer has licensed an artificial-intelligence copy of himself, in a deal that people in the industry describe as the leading edge of a new market in athletes' digital identities.
In mid-September Cristian Volpato, who plays for the Italian Serie A club Sassuolo, struck a deal with the California-based company Callandor to license his AI image, Guardian Australia reported. Callandor was given exclusive rights to his digital likeness, voice, biometric profiles and performance data.
The company will monetise that image by landing brand deals and taking a cut, and will help restrict content that does not have his approval. A promotional video shows a synthetic Volpato striding through an atrium and spawning four digital clones that peel away and re-emerge in different settings around the world.
Callandor's co-founder Michael Fisk, a former executive at Sony Pictures and MGM, told Guardian Australia he is in the business of making "synthetic twins". "Cristian is constantly training," Fisk said. "He's constantly out there playing. If he has any free time whatsoever, he'll probably want to spend it with family and friends, so he loses on a lot of opportunities on brand placements."
"A synthetic twin could be used 24-7, year-round by brands," Fisk said. "Assuming it's approved, right?" Founded in February, Callandor has a small stable of athletes including the Brazilian footballer Jorginho and the American sailor Chris Poole, and its campaigns remain in a pilot phase.
Volpato is not the first to try it. In June the Brazilian player Neymar licensed his AI likeness to a Chinese-owned entertainment platform, which produced short videos published during the World Cup. Meanwhile the AFL told its gambling partner Sportsbet to stop using AI images of players without their consent after a complaint from the players' union, and player contracts with the major Australian leagues make no mention of AI at all.
William Saunders, who leads the Sydney start-up Hyperknown, says athletes are realising that if they do not monetise their AI image, others will. "Sportsbet shows us what happens when companies and technology get ahead of consent," he said. "Volpato represents the counter-move: people establishing their rights before others start making decisions about their identities. We're watching a race between what technology can do and what people have actually authorised."
The law is some way behind. Jonathan Harlen, an expert in intellectual property law at Southern Cross University, calls the rise of AI brokers "the obvious next step" in a "supercharged global market", and says the new industry presents "a tangle of different interests and rights".
"While copyright already subsists in voice recordings, artistic works and cinematographic images, it is only recognised where there has been human authorship, as well as a degree of independent or creative human effort involved in the making of the work," Harlen said. "It doesn't apply to AI reproductions." Athletes do have some protection under passing-off law, but only where they can prove economic loss.
Saunders expects permission itself to become the signal that matters. "AI can make content abundant. It can't manufacture someone's permission. That's becoming a new commercial requirement," he said. "The next trust signal won't just say 'made with AI'. It will say 'made with this person's permission'."
Put the two halves of this market side by side and something unusual appears. The footballer's image is now infinitely reproducible and, by the account of the lawyer quoted above, uncopyrightable. His agreement is neither.
Everything a synthetic twin produces can be made in unlimited quantity, in any language, in countries the original has never visited, and none of it attracts copyright, because no human made it. The single input that cannot be generated, scaled or cloned is the word yes.
Our analysts therefore record a complete inversion of the asset. What is being licensed is not a likeness, of which there can now be any number, but a permission, of which there is exactly one per person, non-transferable, and held by the one party in the arrangement who can only be in one place at a time.
The scarcity is acute. A synthetic twin can be used twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year-round, in every market at once, assuming it's approved, which requires the attention of a 22-year-old who is, on his own agent's account, constantly training.
The industry has succeeded in making the footballer infinite, and the bottleneck now sits exactly where it sat before, in the free time he would rather spend with family and friends.