AI Ethics: Who Owns My Face?

An evening about deepfakes, AI ethics, and the question of who actually owns our faces in the digital age.

Our face defines our identity and forms the basis of social interaction - but who holds the copyright when a face becomes a dataset with a life of its own? Social media corporations train their models on user photos, big tech sells this data to government-linked security firms, and meanwhile any private individual can use AI to create an avatar with someone else's face. In the first "Beauty Salon" after the summer break, we explore the legal grey zones of personality rights and ask a crucial social-ethical question: what happens to our shared cultural life when our most important communication interface becomes copyable and forgeable?

Our guests are two leading experts on this topic: Judith Simon, professor of ethics in information technology at Hamburg University, deputy chair of the German Ethics Council, former member of the Federal Government's Data Ethics Commission, and member of the European Commission's Scientific Panel on the AI Act. And Thomas Macho, professor of cultural history at Humboldt University Berlin until 2016 and director of the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) at the University of Art Linz in Vienna until October 2023; member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. With his 2011 book "Vorbilder" on the cultural history of the human face, he coined the term "facial society".

Host of the monthly "Beauty Salon" at Urania is Rabea Weihser - independent journalist, former head of culture at ZEIT ONLINE, and former communications director at ALBA BERLIN. In 2025, she published her book "Wie wir so schön wurden. Eine Biografie des Gesichts" with Diogenes.