AI clones are turning celebrity likeness into a new business

For celebrities, time has always been the most expensive part of any endorsement. A brand wants the star, the star wants to protect their time, and everyone ends up trying to fit a shoot into an already-packed calendar.

With artificial intelligence (AI), this could change.

Studio Blo, an India-based AI-native filmmaking studio, is building celebrity clones that allow actors and athletes to license their digital likenesses — AI-generated replicas of their faces, voice, and appearance — to brands without physically turning up for every shoot.


The company, founded by Dipankar Mukherjee, Joel James and Rishabh Suri, has built FAIMOUS, an ethical celebrity-cloning platform focused on consent, ownership and traceability. Studio Blo said they have created a digital clone of cricketer Hardik Pandya and brought together women cricketers of the IPL franchise Mumbai Indians using AI cloning in a single campaign.

How does it work? Instead of a celebrity spending a day shooting an ad, their digital clone can do the work. The celebrity retains ownership of the likeness, while brands get access to the clone for an agreed period.

“We are very clear that ownership does not belong to us,” Mukherjee, CEO and co-founder, Studio Blo, told ET AI. “At any given time, the ownership is in the hands of the celebrity.”

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With FAIMOUS, a celebrity or their team gets a dashboard, and brands and agencies that have paid for access get another. A brand can generate content featuring the celebrity, but it cannot download and publish until the celebrity approves it.

Mukherjee said the company also embeds traceable watermarks and signatures into generated assets, with identifiers unique to each celebrity and individual asset. This is to make the content trackable and different from celebrity deepfakes.

Tackling deepfakes is critical as they have become prevalent on social media. In February 2026, the government amended the IT Rules to address harms from synthetically generated information, including deepfakes and AI-generated content.

In an August 6 release, the government said the rules also prohibit users from sharing content that impersonates others, including through AI. It added that the timeline for intermediaries to remove unlawful information after a valid government or court intimation has been reduced to three hours.

Studio Blo helps celebrities detect deepfakes, Mukherjee added, although taking them down is the responsibility of their legal teams.

Also Read: Govt amends IT rules, with focus on AI content

From deepfakes to digital talent

As celebrities grapple with unauthorised uses of their faces and voices, Studio Blo sensed this as an opportunity to turn the problem into a controlled commercial product.

The company claims to have worked on cloning-as-a-service projects with the likes of Hrithik Roshan, Ayushmann Khurrana, Shraddha Kapoor and Samay Raina.

The company is looking beyond providing cloning technology. “We are slowly transforming into a digital talent management agency,” Mukherjee said.

The idea is that a celebrity’s face, voice and performance could become a licensable digital asset, with brands paying for access under clearly defined terms.

Studio Blo also sees a potential business in building entertainment IP around celebrities.

“If you are a pro athlete, there is no stopping you from becoming a cultural icon as an animated superhero,” Mukherjee said. “Because the audience would love to see you like that.”

Cost of a digital celebrity

The economics of celebrity clones are still being worked out. According to Mukherjee, the technology itself has a per-use cost in line with leading AI platforms. The bigger question is how celebrities price the commercial use of their likeness.

There are currently two schools of thought, he said.

“One is that a celebrity says, ‘If you use my clone, you have more time with me. So, you should pay me the same amount of money I charge you,’” Mukherjee said.

The other view is that an AI clone should cost less because the celebrity is not physically shooting the campaign. Mukherjee expects the market to move in the opposite direction.

“I think in the next six months, you will see AI clones being sold at a premium,” he said.

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His reasoning is that a brand can potentially use the likeness for much longer without taking up the celebrity’s physical time.

“Even if you shoot it, you end up doing a lot of post-production work,” he said. “You're shooting a celebrity against a green screen and then making it look like they are standing next to a waterfall.”

With AI, he argues, much of that work can be done without putting the celebrity on a set.

The pricing could, therefore, shift from paying for a celebrity’s time to paying for access to their likeness.

Keeping it real

Digital cloning comes with a unique problem. The celebrities often change their appearance and that forces companies like Studio Blo to create a new dataset.

Studio Blo said its cloning process can start with footage captured on an iPhone from different angles, which is then used to train an AI model.

However, as per Mukherjee, if a celebrity changes their hairstyle or appearance, the new dataset created helps keep the synthetic version aligned with the real person’s current appearance.

AI is supposed to disappear

Celebrity cloning is only one part of Studio Blo’s larger AI filmmaking business.

The company is working with filmmakers including Shekhar Kapur, Rajkumar Hirani and others on long-form projects, and wants to treat AI as a filmmaking tool rather than the filmmaker itself.

“AI is just an execution tool,” Mukherjee said. “I would say 100% of it is human.” He argues that the important human contribution is not simply operating a camera or editing software, but deciding what the film is trying to say.

“The human role is to play as a provider of intent and a purveyor of taste,” he said.

Studio Blo said it still uses writers, directors, cinematographers, production designers and other creative professionals in the filmmaking process. Mukherjee said the pre-production stage can involve three to four months of work before a single shot is created.

“You can't take the human out of the loop,” he said.