Wanted: Dead or Alive – AI celebrity influencer templates raise questions about who owns a face
November 12 2026
She’s been dead for more than 400 years, but Queen Elizabeth I has been given a new lease of life in 2026.
In one of the least expected twists in the age of TikTok influencers, Queen Elizabeth is emerging as one of the biggest content creators of the year, with her name used in tens of thousands of TikToks including this one … 400 years after she died!
She never posed for a camera, never spoke into a microphone, and never agreed to any of it. Yet there she is, in hyper-realistic videos, doing things she never did.
She’s not the only late Royal who’s in her influencer era – with hundreds of similar TikToks, like this one featuring Queen Victoria.
And here’s Napoleon Bonaparte at the centre of the recent French protests:
So it raises a big question: who owns their faces? And would the answer be any different if they were alive? Dead or alive, it’s an interesting legal area in the UK.
The explosion of celebrity CapCuts
The dramatic advances in AI technology has inspired a new era of AI influencers, using AI tools to swap out your face for an AI-generated character. It became a huge talking point on social media when figures like Jean Philanthrope and Brigitte Macaron achieved overnight viral success, and left people trying to work out whether what they were watching was real. You can read more about them here.
Now the AI-created videos are moving beyond invented figures and long-dead famous people to using the likeness of living celebrities and public figures in a huge range of different scenarios – often joining in with trends or recreating well-known videos.
Here are just a few of the TikToks doing the rounds:
Characters from Friday Night Dinner in the infamous Coldplay kiss cam video
Jim Carrey lipsyncing to Bad Times
Simon Cowell filmed through a window eating a burger
Paul Hollywood and Alison Hammond rapping to BBK by Hayez
Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp performing School Seniors by Frank Medley
Angry Ginge in the old Nestle Crunch TV advert
How easy is it?
Using one of these CapCut templates couldn’t be easier. They’re linked from TikTok, and armed with your own photo – or one of somebody else – you can get the AI to generate a video in a couple of clicks. CapCut does the rest of the work in the background. It takes about 20 minutes to process and create a hyper-realistic video, with a new person in it.
This used to be something that was only possible with very expensive video editing software. The technical barrier has gone. The only thing standing between a person and a convincing fake of someone else is whether they decide to make it.
CapCut Pioneer programme driving the trend
If you look closely at who’s behind some of the biggest celebrity CapCut TikToks you’ll spot some striking similarity – they’re being posted by accounts set up to share new AI-created CapCut templates, usually captioned “Try this filter here” and “Try this template here”, and accompanied by #capcutpioneer and #pioneertemplate.
And that’s where the real motivation for the explosion of this trend becomes apparent: it’s a programme incentivising content creators to grow their earnings by promoting cutting-edge AI-powered editing templates.
CapCut’s website shows some of the templates available, like the face swap template which can be used to generate videos using the likeness of someone famous. They say: “Unlike restrictive tools that only allow swapping with preset celebrity faces, CapCut's AI allows for complete personalization through custom uploads. You can import any clear facial image from your device's gallery, and the AI image generator analyzes the facial geometry to map it accurately onto the target video or image. This flexibility is essential for creators looking to make personalized memes or reaction content.”
Many of the TikToks are flagged as AI-generated – but not all of them – and even when posts do have an AI flag not everyone spots it.
Who owns a face?
It's easy to see why Elizabeth I works so well. Everyone knows the face, thanks to centuries of portraits. Those portraits are out of copyright. And there's nobody left to complain.
There's a case that it's harmless, even useful. If a talking Tudor queen gets people interested in history, what's the problem? But these aren't portraits. They're invented footage of a real person, doing and saying things they never did. Some of what people "learn" this way will stick.
And then there are the living celebrities being featured – like the Jeremy Clarkson, Gordon Ramsay or Celebrity Traitors cast doing a group dance, or Manchester United footballers singing Spin This Coupe.
It’s all fairly innocuous and clearly meant as a parody, right, so what’s the problem?
Celebrity deepfakes can cross a line
A since-deleted video of influencer GK Barry dying her hair red went viral on social media. But there’s one problem – it never happened. She talked on Loose Women about how worried she was about losing control of her own identity, saying: “It gets to a point where what if someone did a video of me saying something that was outrageous and people then believed that I had actually said that. And there's sort of no way to prove that it's AI.Especially if it looks like it.”
GK Barry says it’s hard to deal with, as when posts are reported she’s often told that the videos haven’t been created on their platform. So the video can be deleted, but the root cause of the problem isn’t addressed.
And her fellow Loose Women panellist Lisa Riley says that a deepfake video of her caused significant harm to her mental health – wrongly showing a photo of her with her baby, when in reality she’s been unable to conceive.
She said: “The baby I'm holding is Evelyn, my niece, the first day she was born.And I've never had that feeling where a family member rang me up and was like congratulations and I'm like, well, for a start, I mean, you know, no medical world now I'm 50, you know, but it's still the damage that it is doing.”
She’s not the only celebrity being targeted – this AI-generated TikTok claims to show content creators Natalie Reynolds and Albert Lima announcing they’re having a baby.
Dead or alive: does the law care?
According to the European Commission, deepfakes must “carry a clear label to help you recognise when you’re looking at AI-generated or modified content that falsely appears to be truthful or authentic”.
In the UK it feels like there’s a test case waiting to happen. Inside Tech Law says: “UK law provides no standalone statutory protection for a person’s image or identity. UK courts have also been reluctant to expand existing doctrines, such as passing off, to fill this gap. In Elvis Presley Enterprises Inc v Sid Shaw Elvisly Yours [1999] RPC 567, Simon Brown LJ in the Court of Appeal cautioned against assuming that only a celebrity “may ever market (or license the marketing of) his own character,” reflecting concern that such recognition would too readily create monopolies over identity.
“Copyright law offers limited recourse against deepfakes. To establish infringement, a claimant must show that a substantial part of a protected work has been copied. Generative AI, however, can produce convincing likenesses without copying a single source, instead synthesising new material from its training data. Therefore, even where aspects of AI development are likely to infringe copyright, this framework does little to protect individuals whose likenesses are created independently of any identifiable original works.”
Other creative industries have wrestled with ownership for decades. Music rights have been protected for years, yet anyone who has dealt with songwriting, recording and performance rights knows how complicated that area remains. Photography has its own long-running debate, because the copyright in a picture usually belongs to the photographer, not the person in it.
Protecting a person's own image, their own face, is a different problem. When a face can be reproduced this realistically, from a handful of photos, by anyone, the old frameworks struggle to keep up.
Music and photo rights are mostly about commercial exploitation: who gets paid when a song or picture is used. Most of these face-swap videos aren't selling anything. And most aren't fooling anyone either. Nobody really believes a celebrity did that dance.
But they show what is now possible. If a harmless, obviously fake clip takes minutes to make, so does one that isn't obvious: one that leaves people wondering where someone really was, and whether they really did it. That is closer to defamation than copyright. And even where no law is broken, the cost is mistrust, uncertainty about what is real, and no clear sense of where the boundaries lie. The silly videos may just be the tip of the iceberg.
One consideration in law is “passing off”, which stops someone falsely implying a person endorses something. A deepfake that implies a celebrity backs a product may well cross that line. But a fake made purely for laughs, with nothing being sold, is much harder to stop.
There are other routes. Defamation if the fake damages a person's reputation. Data protection if their personal data was misused. And since February 2026, creating or requesting an intimate deepfake of someone without consent is a criminal offence. (Reed Smith)
What's coming
In March 2026 the government said it would look at whether a new personality or digital replica right is needed, and promised further consultation on deepfakes and image rights. (RPC) Footballers including Lucy Bronze and Cole Palmer are backing a campaign for personality rights legislation (Mills & Reeve), and the actors' union Equity has been pushing for the same since 2022.
Where does this end?
If anyone can create a hyper-realistic video of anyone, in any situation, the list of people it can happen to is everyone.
From famous faces to any face. Celebrities are first because their faces are everywhere. But the same tools work on anyone with a handful of photos online.
Commercial creep. Joke videos build the audience; fake endorsements and scam ads cash in on it.
Who owns a face? For the living, the answer is "sort of, if you can afford a lawyer". For the dead, it's nobody.
Will the law arrive in time? And when it does, will it protect the dead at all, or only for a few decades?
Right now, a face is up for grabs, dead or alive. The tools to take it are free and the law is still catching up. Until it does, the only thing protecting anyone's face is other people's choices.
