Lionel Messi

Lionel Messi (born 1987) is the most decorated footballer in history — eight Ballon d’Or awards, a 2022 World Cup title with Argentina, and a late-career act at Inter Miami that reshaped American soccer. Famously reserved off the pitch, he has nonetheless ended up on every side of the AI story: licensed avatar, scam-deepfake victim, and finally the global face of ChatGPT.

The consented clone — and the criminal ones

Messi was an early, willing subject of synthetic media. For Lay’s 2021 “Messi Messages” campaign he spent five minutes in a green-screen studio recording footage that trained Synthesia’s deep-learning model, producing a lip-synced AI avatar that let fans send personalized video greetings from Messi in eight languages — a stunt novel enough to win a Cannes Lion. The unauthorized clones came later: in 2024, deepfakes spliced from a real interview he gave the Argentine streamer Olga circulated as Instagram ads, one pushing a fake earnings app called Wildcat Dive and another promoting a pyramid-scheme trading platform, prompting alerts from cybersecurity firm ESET.

Face of ChatGPT

In January 2026 Messi told the Argentine show Luzu TV that he personally has never gotten into AI — while volunteering that his wife “Antonela is on ChatGPT all day, asking it everything — recipes, questions about food, about everything.” Five months later, on the opening day of the 2026 World Cup, Sam Altman’s OpenAI announced Messi as the first public figure it has ever signed to a global partnership, fronting a campaign that had fans generate more than 17 million World Cup prompts in a week — including the viral #MessiMode image style he demonstrated himself.