Who owns your face?

For most of legal history, the question "who owns your face" was close to abstract. Your image was yours in a quiet, uncontested way, because reproducing it convincingly was hard. Generative AI removed that friction. A few seconds of footage or a handful of photographs can now be enough to recreate a person's appearance and voice, place them in scenes they never filmed, and make them say words they never spoke. For an actor, a presenter or a brand built around a single face, identity has become an asset that can be copied at scale. So the abstract question is now a commercial one, and Turkish law already has more to say about it than most people assume.

The starting point: your image is protected

Turkish law treats a person's image as part of their legal personality. The clearest rule sits in the Intellectual and Artistic Works Act (FSEK), articles 86 and 87: a person's picture or portrait cannot be exhibited or communicated to the public without their consent. That protection does not end at death. It continues for ten years, with the consent of the heirs standing in for the consent of the person.

Two further provisions reinforce this. Article 24 of the Civil Code protects personality rights against unlawful interference, and article 49 of the Code of Obligations gives a right to compensation when that interference causes harm. Read together, these rules already let a person control the public use of their image and seek a remedy when it is used without permission. None of this is new. What is new is the kind of use the law is now being asked to govern.

Where AI changes the question

The instruments above were written for photographs and broadcasts, not for synthetic media. They assume an image that exists, taken from a real moment. AI breaks that assumption. A "digital twin" is not a captured photograph; it is a model trained on a person and then asked to generate something the person never did. A deepfake borrows an identity to manufacture a false record. A synthetic voice can read a script the speaker never saw.

Turkey has no dedicated statute on AI likeness yet. A general AI bill has been discussed but is not in force. In practice this means the older tools carry the weight: an unauthorised digital twin or deepfake is analysed as an interference with personality and image rights under FSEK 86, Civil Code 24 and Obligations Code 49, rather than under a purpose-built rule. The framework holds, but it asks lawyers to map new facts onto old language, which is exactly where careful drafting earns its keep.

The law that protects your face was written before anyone could synthesise it. Until that changes, the contract has to do the work.

Data protection is the other half

There is a second body of law that almost everyone forgets, and it is often the decisive one. A face and a voice are personal data. Under Turkey's data protection law (KVKK), biometric data is a special category, named expressly in article 6. Training an AI system on someone's image or voice, or building a model of their likeness, is therefore data processing, and special-category data carries the strictest conditions.

This area moved recently. A March 2024 amendment to KVKK rewrote article 6, so that special-category data, including biometrics, can now be processed on several lawful bases rather than on explicit consent alone. For a media or AI business this is good news and a trap at once. The good news is flexibility. The trap is that choosing the wrong basis, or relying on a consent form that never mentioned AI, can make an entire pipeline unlawful. Getting the lawful basis right is now a core part of any likeness project, not an afterthought.

What to actually do

For talent and agencies, the release form is the front line. A consent written for a single photoshoot will not cover training a model, generating new performances, or licensing a likeness to a third party. The release has to name those uses or it does not authorise them. For brands and producers, two things must travel together: a licence for the image right and a sound KVKK basis for the data processing behind it. One without the other is half a deal. For estates, the ten-year window after death is a real and usable right, not a technicality.

None of this is uncharted. It is an older framework doing a newer job, and it does that job well when the agreements are written with the technology in mind. Where the statute has not caught up, a careful contract carries the protection.