Deepfakes: There's a thin line between satire and defamation
Satire has long been accepted as a legitimate form of free speech, not constituting defamation. However, with the advent of deepfakes generated by various Generative AI software tools, whether content is parody or defamation is not limited to only the question of what is said, but now includes the question of whether the viewer can reasonably tell who said it.
Several public figures in India have recently been the subject of deepfakes, some of which were widely circulated on social media. While morphed images are not a new phenomenon, deepfakes created by artificial intelligence (AI) are distinguished by a much higher degree of realism.
As AI—and deepfakes in particular—go mainstream across online platforms, the question of how these technologies affect our legal obligations to one another is gaining salience. The Delhi high court recently examined the use of non-consensual deepfakes in the matter of Anil Kapoor vs Simply Life India & Others.
The Hindi film actor Anil Kapoor had approached the Delhi high court against the misuse of his image, name, voice and persona without his consent. The Delhi high court observed that tools like AI have made it possible for unauthorized users to use the visual and audio data of any person to create deepfakes.
The court held that Anil Kapoor’s likeness, image, persona, etc, all deserve to be protected under the intellectual property law, and therefore users cannot create deepfakes without consent for their own commercial purposes. The court also observed that the legal protection accorded to free-speech referring to public figures includes satire within its ambit, but does not include speech that jeopardizes the “individual’s personality" or “attributes associated with (them)…"
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