AlterCast opens a Polish marketplace for licensed faces in AI ads

AlterCast, a Polish startup, has opened a marketplace where people license their face for advertising made with artificial intelligence. Polish trade press reported the launch on 10 and 11 September. Anyone can list a face, not only professional actors.

Humanverse founders and former XTB marketer Oliwia Szpigiel run it

The founders come from Humanverse, a Polish agency that produces AI advertising. Oliwia Szpigiel, until recently chief marketing officer at the broker XTB, is chief executive and co-founder. Paweł Mazurkiewicz is co-founder and creative director. Krzysztof Kujawski, who runs Humanverse, sits on the board, and the law firm SKP Ślusarek Kubiak Pieczyk advised on the contracts.

Szpigiel told the trade title Wirtualnemedia, in Polish, that “your face can work for you, even while you sleep”. The pitch to advertisers is a different one. Kujawski points to thousands of licensed faces available without castings and without weeks of waiting.

The licence names product categories, contexts and markets

Each agreement sets out what a face may be used for. A person can rule out whole categories, limit the markets, and withdraw consent later. Payment works as a royalty, so money arrives for every commercial use rather than once, as a buyout.

That structure answers the main complaint about synthetic faces in advertising. After a broad buyout, an image can turn up in a campaign the person would never have agreed to, and nobody pays again. A narrow licence with an off switch is the opposite arrangement.

EU rules on marking AI content start on 2 December

Timing helps the idea. The general transparency duties in the AI Act, the European Union law on artificial intelligence, have applied since 2 August 2026. Technical marking of AI material, such as watermarks and metadata, follows on 2 December under the Digital Omnibus package.

An advertiser that has to declare AI content also needs to know where a face came from. That question is still being settled in practice, as the row over who labels AI content in Polish advertising shows.

SAG-AFTRA says 90 percent of its actors are out of work at any time

The supply side has its own numbers. The American actors union SAG-AFTRA reports that 90 percent of its members are without work at any given moment, and that only 12 percent earn more than 1,000 dollars a year from acting. A royalty on a licensed face is not a career. It is income that does not require a casting call.

AlterCast has not said how many faces are listed, who has invested, or which brands have signed. Until it does, the product is a promise rather than a market. It arrives into an argument that is already running, though: brands are advertising being human, and Desigual built a campaign against AI around exactly that unease.