AI, Likenesses, and Your Film

AI tools can turn your production stills into key art, storyboards, and marketing images. When those stills show real people, two questions come first: do you have their consent, and who owns what the AI produces?

Consent for AI processing of real faces

• A person's face is theirs. Most people appearing in your film signed a talent release — but many standard releases were written before AI, and may not clearly cover generating new imagery of that person.
• Get consent that names AI explicitly. Before running photos of cast, crew, or bystanders through AI tools, confirm each identifiable person has consented to AI-assisted processing of their likeness — including stylized or generated versions of them appearing in posters and promotional art.
• This is why ShotBible asks. Features that accept your uploaded images require a per-project confirmation that you have the right to upload them and the consent of anyone depicted.

Why AI-generated artwork may have limited copyright protection

Under current U.S. Copyright Office guidance, material generated by AI without sufficient human authorship generally is not eligible for copyright registration. A poster produced substantially by an AI model may therefore have thinner protection than one composed by a human designer — meaning others could potentially reuse similar imagery with less recourse for you.

What that means for posters and merch

• Treat AI output as a starting point: human selection, arrangement, retouching, and typography strengthen both the design and your claim to authorship of the finished piece.
• For merchandise — where exclusivity has direct monetary value — the limits on protecting purely AI-generated imagery matter most. Plan for meaningful human contribution in anything you intend to sell.
• Keep records of who made what: prompts, source images, consents, and the human design work layered on top.