It’s a joke my family has made about me for years - but there’s truth behind it. I’ve always loved the magic of stories on stage and on screen. Growing up, if I wasn’t in some school play, I was busy writing one of my own. As a teenager, I worked my way through entire oeuvres of Bergman, Kieslowski and Truffaut, and then Haneke, Tarkovsky and Almodóvar…

I was, to put it mildly, insufferable. 

However, for reasons that are better explained over a glass of wine rather than a professional website, my dreams of Hollywood and/or Broadway never materialised. Instead, I left the American west coast to study at the London School of Economics, where I decided to pursue a legal career.

I started out in a large, corporate firm: I learned to draft 100-page frameworks, manage high-stakes negotiations, and withstand the pressure of deals worth millions of pounds. I loved the intensity and was good at the job.

But a deepfake in 2018 changed everything.

When I read Scarlett Johansson’s interview about being “deepfaked” into porn videos, I felt something shift. As journalists and victims started to shine the spotlight on deepfake porn — now more accurately referred to as intimate image abuse — campaigners rightly called for this sort of deplorable content to be criminalised.

But I kept coming back to a different question: even if x-rated deepfakes were made illegal, what would stop productions from making more “innocent” deepfakes for film and TV shows? Why not create perfectly-behaved, drama-free digital replicas of actors who would never be late on set require re-shoots?

If AI technology was capable of hyper-realistically cloning actors, what happens to the line between fantasy and truth?

If we remove humans from human performance, what’s left?

This wasn’t just about legal rights: it was about having the ability to decide how and when you are seen and heard. But even with the best legal team money could buy, things like copyright and privacy law are often balanced against freedom of expression, and internet regulations are often influenced by big tech.

What began as an interest in protecting performers from unauthorised digital replicas soon extended into genAI expertise more broadly, primarily around manipulated and synthetic content.

In 2024, I made the decision to leave the corporate law firm world to start my own practice, so I’d have fewer distractions and more freedom to take on meaningful work.

At the end of the day, I’m just a girl who loves good writing, good music, and good art. And I’m fairly certain no machine will ever do it better than we humans can. 

(Sorry, Elon.)