Deepfakes And Intellectual Property: Understanding Legal Challenges And Protections In The Artificial Intelligence Era

The emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence has made it easier to alter or re-create an individual's persona in the digital space with remarkable accuracy, and this raises questions on the ethical implications of the evolving technology. Indeed, the use of AI assists in the creation of deep fake images and videos, which subsequently impacts the Intellectual Property rights that individuals may have over their persona in the digital space. In this article, we discuss the intersection among AI, deep fakes, and intellectual property rights.

Deepfakes are a type of synthetic media created using AI technologies, particularly generative adversarial networks (GANs). GANs involve two neural networks: a generator that creates synthetic content like images, videos, or audio, and a discriminator that checks these outputs against a dataset of real data to determine their authenticity. Deepfakes can take various forms, such as face swaps, attribute edits, or face