Kristen Bell

Kristen Bell (born 1980) rose to fame as the title sleuth of “Veronica Mars,” voiced Princess Anna in Disney’s “Frozen” films, and starred as Eleanor Shellstrop in NBC’s “The Good Place.” One of the most bankable voices in animation, she has ended up on both sides of the AI likeness debate — victim of nonconsensual cloning, then paid licensor of the real thing.

From deepfake victim to Meta AI voice

In 2020, Bell told Vox she had discovered — via Ashton Kutcher warning her husband Dax Shepard — that pornographic deepfakes using her face were circulating online. She called the experience exploitative and made consent the crux of her objection: the videos were wrong because she never agreed to them.

Four years later, consent came with a contract. At Meta Connect in September 2024, Meta announced that its Meta AI assistant could speak in a set of licensed celebrity voices — Bell alongside Judi Dench, John Cena, Awkwafina and Keegan-Michael Key. Press reports said Meta paid the performers millions of dollars each for multi-year voice rights. The arrangement drew an implicit line Bell had already articulated in 2020: the technology is not the offense — the absence of consent is.

Bell has not publicly elaborated on the Meta deal, and her two positions are not in tension: she opposed unauthorized synthetic media while accepting paid, authorized voice licensing. Her trajectory mirrors the settlement the wider industry has been groping toward — from panic over cloning to negotiated consent-and-compensation frameworks.