LA Today Spotlight: IndieMe.ai | The LA Startup Protecting Talent in the Age of AI
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
MEET THE FOUNDER
Meet Dion Johnson, a Los Angeles native, award-winning creative technologist, AWS speaker, and Techstars alum who spent his career on both sides of the AI disruption in entertainment — building the visual effects and advertising tools that shape stories, and watching those same tools get turned on the people in front of the camera without their consent. That tension is what led him to found IndieMe.ai, a Los Angeles technology company building what Johnson calls a consent layer for entertainment.
ABOUT INDIEME.AI
"A face is a career. A voice is a livelihood."
The AI era doesn't have to come at the expense of the people whose faces and voices power it. The platform lets talent register their likeness, watches the internet for unauthorized copies, helps remove what was never approved, and gives brands a way to license real faces with consent and compensation built in from the start.
How it works: Talent who join complete a secure face-and-voice scan, which becomes a digital fingerprint of their likeness. From there, IndieMe's systems scan the web nightly for unauthorized uses, AI replicas, and stolen images. When something is found and verified, always with a human confirming the match, removal starts with a single button. When a brand wants to license a face for a campaign, the deal runs through the talent's consent, with royalties attached.
"A face is a career. A voice is a livelihood. Right now, AI can take both without consent, credit, or compensation. We started IndieMe because that should not be normal, and it does not have to be." — Dion Johnson
9 QUESTIONS
WITH DION JOHNSON
1. You've said a face is a career and a voice is a livelihood, and right now AI can take both without consent, credit, or compensation. As an LA native who built his career inside entertainment, was there a specific moment that made you decide IndieMe.ai had to exist?
For me, it came from years of working inside visual effects, advertising, and feature films. Altering images and video used to be a highly specialized skill — in the right hands, it protected productions, brands, and talent at a global level. But I also saw the other side: how quickly a false image or a misleading clip could damage someone's career, even before AI made that kind of manipulation available to almost anyone.
When AI made face and voice manipulation easier and faster, I realized this couldn't be treated like another creative trend. A face is not just a file. A voice is not just data. For actors, models, creators, and public figures, it's their livelihood. IndieMe.ai was built to protect the people brave enough to put their face, voice, and talent into the world...they shouldn't lose control of it just because technology moved faster than consent.
2. Walk us through what actually happens when a model or actor joins.
It's designed to feel simple for the talent, even though a lot is happening behind the scenes. A model or actor completes a secure face-and-voice registration, which creates a protected digital fingerprint of their likeness. From there, our systems monitor where that likeness appears online, looking for unauthorized uses, AI replicas, or stolen images.
When something suspicious turns up, we verify first, either the talent or a member of our team confirms it's actually them before anything happens. We don't believe a system should make high-stakes decisions about someone's identity without a human in the loop. If it's misuse, the talent or their agency can review the evidence and start a takedown through the platform.
The other side is licensing. If a brand wants to use a real person's likeness in an AI-assisted campaign, it shouldn't be a gray area. It gets routed through consent, usage terms, approvals, and royalties, so talent knows what's being used, where, for how long, and how they're being paid. That's the difference between AI extraction and AI opportunity.
3. Your CTO Monroe Johnson says finding faces on the internet isn't the hard part; being right every single time is. How did you engineer the system around that level of accuracy, and why does it matter so much?
Because we're dealing with someone's identity and reputation. If we tell a model, actor, or agency their likeness is being misused, we can't be casual about it. A false positive creates panic. A false negative lets harm continue.
So we built IndieMe.ai around verification, evidence, and human accountability: identity verification, facial matching, reverse image discovery, audit logs, evidence packages, and review workflows, plus a human who has to confirm every match. AI can help us move faster, but people still need to be involved when the decision affects someone's career or income.
Detection is only step one. The real product is trust. Agencies and talent need to know that when IndieMe.ai flags something, there's a reason, there's evidence, and there's a process behind it. That's why Monroe treats the platform less like a search tool and more like infrastructure that's secure, explainable, and reliable enough for people to make real decisions about their careers.
4. Instead of signing talent one at a time, you went straight to the agencies that represent them, starting with State Management and NLE Group International, and now more than 15,000 faces enrolled. Why was agency-first the right play?
Agencies are where the trust already lives. They understand usage rights, conflicts, brand safety, and the value of a person's image, and they understand that not all press is bad press. Managing talent isn't just about hiding someone from risk; it's about understanding what makes them marketable.
But over the last ten years, agencies have lost negotiation power because of technology such as social platforms, creator tools, and automated content pipelines have changed how talent gets discovered, booked, and used.
I see IndieMe.ai as a way for agencies to evolve and protect their business model. Instead of asking every model or actor to figure out AI protection alone, we give agencies a tool that protects the entire roster and helps them negotiate AI usage from a position of information instead of uncertainty. It also opens a real revenue path — routing AI opportunities back to the actual people on the roster, with scoped terms, clear consent, and compensation attached.
5. You've built a team that uses AI to police AI. Kayla McGuinn says you're "putting AI on the side of the people it's been taking from." How did you assemble a team that believes in that?
I think AI isn't the enemy. Unconsented use is the enemy. There's a big difference between using AI as a creative tool and using it to take from people without permission.
The line I keep coming back to is Spider-Man's: with great power comes great responsibility. That's how I see AI. It's powerful enough to help people create and imagine things that were impossible before, but used without consent or compensation, it becomes dangerous.
That's why the team matters — Monroe brings the engineering discipline, Kayla brings the agentic AI and detection mindset, India Wayman brings the compliance lens. Everyone looks at the problem from a different angle, but we all agree on the foundation: consent cannot be optional.
6. You tested your own thesis on screen with Nature Boy, an AI-assisted short validated through the platform that's been featured at the Beverly Hills Film Festival, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art, and the World Culture Film Festival. Why prove this on your own production instead of just selling a tool to everyone else?
Because if we're asking the industry to trust a new way of working, we have to be willing to use it ourselves. Nature Boy let us test the creative and ethical thesis together and not just "here's a compliance tool," but can AI-assisted production still respect authorship, consent, and emotional storytelling?
Entertainment isn't just files and workflows, it's feeling — whether people connect to what they're watching. We wanted to show AI can be part of the process without stripping away the human center of the work. That experience shapes how we talk to agencies, brands, and studios now: the goal isn't to replace creative people, it's to build a safer system where rights, consent, and provenance are built in from the beginning.
7. You've said consent isn't a feature you added, it's the foundation everything sits on. How is IndieMe.ai building to stay ahead of regulation instead of scrambling to catch up?
Regulation is moving toward a clear principle: if you use someone's likeness, voice, or identity, you need permission, disclosure, and records. The exact laws will keep evolving by state, platform, and country, but the direction is obvious such as provenance, consent documentation, biometric safeguards, disclosure, accountability.
We're building around that future now: identity verification, consent templates, audit trails, evidence packages, takedown workflows, provenance-ready distribution. We don't want compliance added after a problem happens and we want it built into the workflow from the start. Companies that treat consent as infrastructure will move faster later. Companies that treat it like paperwork will end up scrambling.
8. You're now in early conversations with major studios about ethical AI use and with brands looking for consent-cleared faces. What does the win look like five years from now?
The win is that consent becomes the default. Five years from now, I want IndieMe.ai to be part of the standard infrastructure agencies, studios, brands, and creators trust when they need to use likeness responsibly. If a brand wants a consent-cleared face, there should be a clear path. If a studio is using AI-assisted production, there should be a clear record of what was approved. If talent wants protection, they shouldn't have to wait until something bad happens.
I'm careful not to overstate where things stand — this space is still early, and nobody can promise exactly what entertainment looks like in five years. But I believe someone is going to become the standard the industry plugs into for ethical AI likeness use, and we're building IndieMe.ai to be that standard: protect the person, verify the rights, license the use, distribute with proof.
9. You were born and raised here and built your career in this industry. When you need to think, reset, or feel inspired, what's your favorite specific place in LA County to go?
The beach at night. There's something sacred about standing at the edge of the water after the city has gone quiet and the sky opens up, the moon feels like a witness reminding me the dreams I'm chasing aren't as far away as they sometimes feel. The ocean calms me. Every wave feels like it's pulling the stress and doubt out of me, and the vision gets clearer.
That's what Los Angeles has always been for me. It's a city where impossible things still feel close enough to chase, built by dreamers, image-makers, and storytellers who came here because they believed their face, their voice, or their story could mean something to the world. That makes LA the right place for IndieMe.ai. If AI is going to reshape identity and entertainment, LA should have a voice in how that future is built: move fast, but don't erase people.
CONNECT WITH INDIEME.AI
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