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Chesney & Citron: "Deep Fakes and the Infocalypse"
paperCredibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: SSRN
A widely cited foundational paper in AI governance circles on synthetic media risks; relevant to AI safety researchers studying misuse of generative AI and the societal consequences of capability proliferation.
Metadata
Importance: 72/100working paperanalysis
Summary
Chesney and Citron provide a foundational legal and policy analysis of deepfake technology, examining how AI-generated synthetic media creates harms across privacy, democracy, and national security. They argue deepfakes will accelerate 'truth decay' and propose a multi-layered response involving law, platform governance, and technical countermeasures.
Key Points
- •Deepfakes leverage machine learning to produce increasingly realistic synthetic audio/video, becoming both more convincing and more accessible to non-expert actors.
- •Harms span multiple domains: non-consensual intimate imagery, political disinformation, fraud, and destabilization of international relations.
- •The 'liar's dividend' effect is a key concern: deepfakes allow bad actors to dismiss genuine evidence as fabricated, eroding epistemic trust broadly.
- •Existing legal frameworks (defamation, fraud, privacy torts) offer partial but insufficient remedies, requiring new legislative and regulatory approaches.
- •Technical detection countermeasures are in an arms race with generation capabilities, necessitating platform-level authentication and provenance standards.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| AI-Driven Legal Evidence Crisis | Risk | 43.0 |
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# Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security
[107 California Law Review 1753 (2019)](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3213954#)
[U of Texas Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 692](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3213954#)
[U of Maryland Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2018-21](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3213954#)
68 PagesPosted: 21 Jul 2018Last revised: 17 Dec 2019
[See all articles by Robert Chesney](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=119080 "View other papers by this author")
## [Robert Chesney](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=119080 "View other papers by this author")
University of Texas School of Law
## [Danielle Keats Citron](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=463718 "View other papers by this author")
University of Virginia School of Law
Date Written: July 14, 2018
### Abstract
Harmful lies are nothing new. But the ability to distort reality has taken an exponential leap forward with “d
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