Who Owns Your Face? Rethinking Identity in the Age of AI

When was the last time you looked in the mirror and felt certain the reflection was truly yours?
In the age of artificial intelligence, even that question has become complicated. Every day, millions of faces are scanned, copied, and generated, often without consent. Deepfakes can now speak with our voices, mimic our emotions, and blur the line between truth and illusion. But the real question isn’t just technological. It’s human: Who do we become when our image no longer proves who we are?

For decades, facial recognition was about efficiency, unlocking phones, verifying identities, speeding up access. But technology has evolved faster than our ethics. We’ve entered a time when being seen is not the same as being known.
In my work with BioID, a company pioneering privacy-first face recognition and liveness detection, I’ve seen how technology can verify presence without compromising dignity. It’s not about surveillance, it’s about trust. And that raises deeper questions:
Can machines recognise authenticity?
Can algorithms detect intention, or only imitation?

What started as a technical challenge has become a philosophical one:
How do we protect human dignity in a world that can duplicate faces, voices, even emotions?

Behind every pixel, there’s a pulse. Behind every dataset, a decision.
That’s the part we often forget: technology doesn’t define us, it reflects us.
AI is not stealing our humanity; it’s showing us what we value most about it. When we teach machines to recognise faces, we’re also teaching ourselves what it means to be recognised: to be real, to be trusted, to be seen as we are. The question is no longer “What can AI do?” but “What should we preserve while it does it?”

At the Nürnberg Digital Festival, progress is celebrated, but one also pauses to ask: progress towards what?
In a digital economy where identity is currency, authenticity becomes our most valuable asset. The future won’t belong to those who create the most data, but to those who can prove they are truly there.
That’s why my upcoming talk at Tedx, “Who Owns Your Face?”, goes beyond deepfakes and biometrics. It’s about something larger:
how we reclaim presence in an age of replicas, how we stay human in a world of perfect imitations. Because the real frontier of AI isn’t intelligence, it’s integrity.

Every revolution begins with awareness. We built machines that can learn. Now we must teach them, and ourselves, how to care.
The question “Who owns your face?” is not about control, but connection. It’s about remembering that our faces tell stories no algorithm can replicate, stories of memory, emotion, and truth.
If we protect that, we don’t just secure identity. We preserve what makes us human.