What Can The Law Do About ‘Deepfake'?

Introduction

In November 2017, videos began appearing on www.reddit.com featuring celebrities' faces superimposed onto actors and actresses in pornographic videos (and a surprising number of random Nicolas Cage appearances, most of which are thankfully not pornographic). Such face-swapping videos were made possible by software technology that uses machine-learning algorithms to analyze photographs of a target subject, "learning" the map of the target subject's face (the more photographs, the more accurate the portrayal), and then superimposing the target subject's "face" onto a video, sometimes producing extremely convincing results. Such open source technology is commonly referred to as "deepfake technology", the term "deepfake" being a portmanteau of the concept of machine "deep learning" and the word "fake." In January 2018, a free, user-friendly app was launched that made deepfake technology accessible to the general public and to those without technological