Exploitation of Public Figures' Faces by AI Platforms as a Form of Unjust Enrichment: A Juridical Study within the Indonesian Legal System

Abstract

The commodification of public figures' faces within generative AI ecosystems raises a question Indonesian law has yet to answer: who holds entitlement to the economic value extracted from a person's likeness when platforms replicate and monetize it without meaningful consent. That gap frames an inquiry into the legal status of a public figure's face as an economic asset, whether AI platforms' use of it amounts to unjust enrichment, and how accountability should attach to the platforms involved. Through normative legal research grounded in the Copyright Law, the Electronic Information and Transactions Law, the Personal Data Protection Law, and Article 1365 of the Civil Code, the analysis asks how far systematic and teleological interpretation can reach an exploitation unfolding algorithmically rather than through conventional appropriation. A public figure's face, the study finds, has shifted from a marker of identity into an intangible asset sustaining platform valuation, while existing legal regimes remain fragmented rather than complementary: copyright refuses to treat a face as a protectable work, and data protection law leans toward privacy rather than economic interest. That misalignment lets the four elements of unjust enrichment, enrichment, loss, causation, and absence of legal basis, be satisfied, and opens the possibility of qualifying the conduct as unlawful under Article 1365. The study proposes a layered accountability model of profit restitution, compensation, dataset transparency, and explicit consent, its novelty lying in positioning unjust enrichment as a distributive-justice framework for generative AI's exploitation of identity, a terrain Indonesian legal scholarship has scarcely addressed.