Deepfakes and the Law

This collection offers the first sustained, multidisciplinary legal analysis of deepfakes and their far-reaching consequences.

Deepfake technology has moved with disorienting speed from fringe curiosity to a global social, political and legal problem. Once the preserve of Hollywood studios, the ability to fabricate hyper-realistic images, audio and video is now available to anyone with a smartphone. Its most prevalent and devastating use remains the creation of non-consensual sexually explicit content targeting women. Yet deepfakes also fuel political disinformation, destabilise democratic processes, enable fraud and identity theft, and contribute to a broader post-truth climate in which the authenticity of all digital evidence becomes contestable. In this landscape, one of the most urgent tasks is simply to begin the right conversations about how law and society should respond. Across three sections, an international array of scholars examine how synthetic media challenges foundational assumptions about privacy, image rights, evidential truth and democratic integrity. These essays explore deepfakes’ profound impact on the individual dignity of both the living and the dead, their capacity to generate epistemic uncertainty, and the structural difficulties they pose for courts, regulators and lawmakers. Bringing together theoretical, doctrinal and comparative insights, the book illuminates a fragmented regulatory landscape and articulates both the pressing need for more coherent, principled governance of synthetic media, and some of the difficulties that will necessarily be encountered by those designing regulatory measures.

This is a timely and vital volume for scholars, jurists and legislators concerned with the future of truth, autonomy and accountability in an increasingly synthetic world.