ABSTRACT
Laws regulating deepfakes are often characterized as protecting privacy or preventing defamation. But examining anti-deepfakes statutes reveals that their breadth exceeds what modern privacy or defamation doctrines can justify: the typical law proscribes material that neither discloses true facts nor asserts false ones. Anti-deepfakes laws encompass harms not cognizable as invasion of privacy or defamation – but not because the laws are overinclusive. Rather, anti-deepfakes laws significantly exceed the dignitary torts’ established boundaries in order to address a distinct wrong: the outrageous use of images per se.
The mechanism by which non-deceptive, pornographic deepfakes cause harm is intuitively simple, yet almost entirely unexamined. Instead, legislators and jurists usually behave as if AI-generated images convey the same information as the photographs and videos they resemble. This approach ignores two blindingly obvious facts: deepfakes are not photographs or video recordings, and often, they don’t even pretend to be. What legal analysis of deepfakes has lacked is a grounding in semiotics, the study of how signs communicate meaning …
Sobel, Benjamin, A Real Account of Deep Fakes (May 15, 2024), Cornell Legal Studies Research Paper Forthcoming.
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