Boston University School of Law Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law Faculty Scholarship 12-2019 Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security Danielle K. Citron Boston University School of Law Robert Chesney University of Texas Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the First Amendment Commons, Internet Law Commons, and the Privacy Law Commons Recommended Citation Danielle K. Citron & Robert Chesney, Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security, 107 California Law Review 1753 (2019). Available at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/640 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security Bobby Chesney* and Danielle Citron** Harmful lies are nothing new. But the ability to distort reality has taken an exponential leap forward with “deep fake” technology. This capability makes it possible to create audio and video of real people saying and doing things they never said or did. Machine learning techniques are escalating the technology’s sophistication, making deep fakes ever more realistic and increasingly resistant to detection. Deep-fake technology has characteristics that enable rapid and widespread diffusion, putting it into the hands of both sophisticated and unsophisticated actors. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38RV0D15J Copyright © 2019 California Law Review, Inc.