As soon as deepfakes and "thispersondoesnotexist" started happening I wanted a tool that would replace everyone's face with a auto-generated face just so I could do street photography without feeling like I was invading people's right to obscurity
That's a really interesting idea. I'm not sure what the commercial value would be, but the artistic value (and gain in privacy) would be huge. I'm not sure what you'd do about identifying marks like tattoos, but perhaps that isn't the biggest concern when compared to faces.
Could you train a model with your own face as a start, and then run your photos through an existing consumer face-swap app? Or perhaps use a celebrities likeness? I wonder how much the visual 'likeness' of a stranger is worth.
Commercial value may be for filmmakers who would no longer have to worry about getting waivers from people in the background of live shots. (Not a lawyer.)
Also not a lawyer, and US-based in case it varies by country.
Do you know if a waiver is needed in this case? My understanding is that I can walk down a sidewalk, around Disneyland, around a resort, and film anyone / anything in plain sight. (I don't do that, by the way...) In other words, assuming you're not climbing over railings etc., if you can see it with your eyes, you can film it or photograph it.
Wonder if anyone here (plenty of legal eagles I'm sure) can confirm this or correct this. We don't need to get bogged down in corner cases & rare exceptions... for example, I think I heard that in some states, if the police ask (demand?) that you stop recording, you have to, otherwise you're in violation of the law... but even as I type that, as an American, it just sounds wrong... but I don't know.
Also not a lawyer, but I think it mostly has to do with commercial use. Filming people at Disney for your Instagram followers is different from making a feature film and turning everyone standing around on a busy street into uncredited extras.
This particular site is with respect to Canada, but I'm pretty sure the same basic idea applies everywhere:
"When publishing photos for commercial purposes: You need the permission of every identifiable model in the photo, even if the photo was taken in a public space. For example, if a photo has 10 identifiable models in the photo, you would require a model release for each of them."
