Written by Nivedita Krishnakumar, a third-year law student at Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law, Patiala, Punjab.

As artificial intelligence increasingly infiltrates aspects of our daily lives, it also quietly and inadvertently reshapes otherwise well settled concepts of identity, personality, property and subsequently commodification, ownership and protection. Technologically enabled replications partly or wholly of human persona are one of the most consequential developments in this context. Given that they sit at a precipitous intersection – that of personality rights and intellectual property rights – they seem to greatly unsettle established legal distinctions in both fields. There is the obvious and necessary expansion of traditional ideas in the two areas to accommodate novel AI based concepts. But further there is the unexpected tension on the balance that needs to be maintained at their convergence. Personality rights, historically grounded in dignity and autonomy, are strained by frameworks of intellectual property that privilege commodification, transferability, and economic value.

This piece argues that this new age marks a critical shift in identity theories from inherent attributes of personality to modular, licensable constructs. It discusses the concept of digital twins and their impact in the context of recent developments. In doing so, it exposes critical gaps in the present legal doctrine, particularly around consent, control, and the reconfiguration of the self as an object of ownership within an AI-mediated economy.

What is a Digital Twin?

Digital twins are virtual representations of real-life products, systems or processes intended to support real time replication allowing for ease of monitoring, prediction, analysis and innovation across various sectors. Perhaps the first use case of this technology was in NASA’s Apollo Space Program where a twin of the command module, and a separate twin of the module’s electrical system was used to bring the crippled Apollo 13 safely back home after an oxygen tank explosion. Since then, this technology has delivered upon its many promises in varying industries across automotive, aerospace, construction, agriculture, mining, utilities, retail, healthcare, military, natural resources, and public safety sectors, increasing efficiency and growth in multitudes.

More recently, the contours of this technology have expanded once again. Earlier this year, popular social media influencer Khaby Lame entered into a $975 million all-stock deal (that later fell through due to a stock collapse) with Rich Sparkle Holdings to commercialise his brand, authorising the use of his facial features, voice and behavioural models to develop an AI powered digital twin. This deal essentially points to a trend of commodification of identity through licensing and external monetization of digital existence evidencing the real-time shift in what counts as profitable assets.

The Nature of “Personality”

The problem that arises here is one of control. A person’s identity – their name, voice, face, gait or characteristic expressions – has always been considered inseparably theirs. Replication constructed through permanent infrastructure creates a class of counterfeit persons that the law does not yet regulate. An indefinitely productive virtual human, reproducing a person’s pattern of being, when commodified, begs a further question – whose personality is it? Is a “personality” alienable?

In India, where the contours of this law are decided entirely by judicial interpretation, there is still no real answer to these questions. The Delhi High Court’s landmark ruling in Titan Industries Ltd. v. Ramkumar Jewellers (2012) defined the right of publicity as the right to control commercial use of human identity. Earlier in ICC Development (International) Ltd. v. Arvee Enterprises (2003), the Court anchored the right of publicity firmly in the constitutional right to privacy, holding that it can inhere only in a living individual and derives from Articles 19 and 21 – suggesting a dignity-based, non-transferable right. Yet in DM Entertainment (P) Ltd. v. Baby Gift House (2010), the same court recognised Daler Mehndi’s assignment of his personality rights to a corporate entity, treating the ‘persona’ as a quasi-property right capable of protecting economic interests.

Read together, these rulings pull in two directions – toward the person, and toward the asset. The replication of personality, in and of itself is perhaps best described as owned intellectual property – an asset that can be scaled, licensed, or as in DM Entertainment, sold, with little human friction. Where a digital twin is built on the data of a real individual, identity ceases to be a personal attribute and becomes a tradeable corporate commodity. However, the person whose likeness contributes to the raw material of the model may retain no proprietary interest in the output under existing IP frameworks. The outputs, generated entirely by artificial intelligence without sufficient human creative contribution, may not even attract copyright protection, meaning that the corporate developer captures all the economic surplus. When a person’s self is disaggregated into data points and fed into a model to produce a commercially valuable persona, the original person has in effect been cannibalised.

A further unlegislated dimension is the post mortem identity of the digital persona. Where in Karan Johar v. Dharma Productions (2023), the Court has held that personality rights lapse at death, the same does not hold true for a persona. This concern is also relevant at the tail end of a temporal contract. Unless adequately monitored, digital twins thus have the capacity to move from a “quasi-property right” to an entirely new race of persons itself.

A Proposed Regulatory Regime

While existing Indian law is not entirely absent on these issues, it is fragmented and insufficient majorly because the law conceptualises identity as something to be protected rather than regulated as a resource. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, the IT Act and the Copyright Act all regulate adjacent subjects partially; however, a human digital twin is simultaneously a concept, a person, and a property and therefore falls outside the purview of any possible regulations presently.

Looking outward, the international legislative record is instructive. The United States’ NO FAKES Act, reintroduced in the Senate in April 2025 and presently before the 119th Congress, creates a federal digital replication right for all individuals, living and deceased, protecting voice and visual likeness against unauthorised AI-generated reproductions. Crucially, the Act provides that this right shall not be assignable during the lifetime of the individual only licensable with post-mortem transferability extending up to seventy years after death, consistent with copyright term lengths. This is a direct statutory embodiment of the philosophy of the inalienable minimum i.e the more intimately a right is connected to a person’s core identity the stronger the case against full alienability. The European Union’s AI Act, meanwhile, takes a different approach. Rather than creating personality rights, it classifies biometric AI systems as high-risk and imposes strict transparency, consent, and documentation obligations, layered on top of the GDPR‘s existing prohibition on processing biometric data without explicit consent.

Although neither model translates directly into the Indian context, both may inform the evolving jurisprudence on this matter. Before long, the law must recognise that a person’s identity carries inherent economic entitlement. This recognition must necessarily come from a comprehensive piece of legislation that adequately addresses these issues, containing at a minimum the following provisions –

1. A statutory definition of a “digital replica” with universal scope, applicable to every natural person indiscriminately,
2. A right to authorise or prohibit the creation and commercial deployment of digital replicas,
3. A classification of this right as personal to the individual and licensable but not outright assignable,
4. When licensed, mandatory written and temporal agreements specifying permitted uses, with over-broad licenses being void as against public policy,
5. Civil remedies including injunctive relief, damages and disgorgement of profits,
6. A reversal of the burden of proof on the commercial entity and not the individual in order to balance the informational asymmetry of the former.

Essentially, identity is an assigned construct meaning that no person has an inherent, objective identity and instead infer it from what is designated to them in this case, by an authority like the law. To question the essence of personality, then, is really to ask who gets to decide, and on what basis. The digital twin poses precisely this question to Indian law. So far there has been an assumption that to be someone is, at minimum, to be present that identity is coextensive with the body that bears it. However, as India advances into an AI-integrated economy, technological shifts demand statutory responses. The law must decide the extent of concepts like personality and identity. At the end of the day, who is a “real” person?