Legal Challenges of Deepfakes: Liability, Harm, and Regulatory Responses

Abstract

Deepfake technologies have rapidly evolved from experimental artificial intelligence innovations into widely accessible tools capable of producing hyper-realistic synthetic media that blur the boundaries between truth and fabrication. Their ability to manipulate identity, falsify expressive acts, and fabricate audiovisual content presents unprecedented challenges for legal systems structured around assumptions of authenticity, traceability, and human agency. This narrative review synthesizes current scholarship and regulatory developments to examine the multifaceted harms associated with deepfakes, including reputational injury, privacy violations, political manipulation, economic fraud, and broader societal erosion of trust. These harms expose significant doctrinal gaps in defamation, privacy, tort, and criminal law, which struggle to account for the speed and anonymity of synthetic media production. The analysis further explores complexities within liability frameworks, focusing on creators, distributors, platforms, AI developers, and malicious users whose involvement complicates traditional models of responsibility. Platform governance, intermediary liability, and cross-border enforcement challenges reveal structural weaknesses in existing regulatory approaches. National, regional, and international responses—including criminal prohibitions, civil remedies, the EU Digital Services Act, and emerging AI governance initiatives—offer partial solutions, yet they remain fragmented and inconsistently enforced. Soft-law interventions, including platform policies, content labeling, and authenticity tools, provide additional layers of protection but lack uniformity and transparency. To move toward a coherent legal framework, this review highlights the need for harmonized standards integrating civil, criminal, technological, and administrative mechanisms. Proposed directions include duty-of-care obligations for AI developers and platforms, mandatory watermarking systems, cross-border cooperation tools, and experimental regulatory sandboxes. Overall, the study emphasizes that addressing deepfake risks requires an interdisciplinary approach combining technological safeguards, legal reform, and multi-stakeholder governance to preserve individual rights, societal trust, and democratic resilience in an era of increasingly sophisticated synthetic media.