Taming the Faceless Beast: Legislating Deepfake Technology

Objective: To deal with the potential deepfake abilities demonstrated by its diverse applications, legal systems have the choice to block this technology completely, allow it and deal with its issues later, or legislate it. Chinese legal system, for example, chose to ban the technology and its applications. If the choice was legislating deepfake, then the question will be what is the most suitable legal ground to use? Methodology: To answer this question, legislators should consider the national laws and the culture of any given legal system by using analytic methodology to the current legislative. Results: Furthermore, it appears that one legal ground is not enough to legislate deepfake technology due to the vast applications of this technology. Also, the ideology of legal principles should be mature enough in order to be used as a legal ground when legislating deepfake. Conclusion: if the copyright law is not advanced in certain legal system, then that legal system cannot legislate deepfake based on copyright legal ground or the results will be insufficient. The deepfake legislating process should not imply prohibiting the technology; in fact, legislating deepfake can boost certain useful application. Keywords: legislation, deepfake(s), deep learning, artificial intelligence.