ABSTRACT
The rapid diffusion of generative artificial intelligence has made the creation of hyper realistic synthetic audio, image, and video termed “deepfakes” cheap, fast, and widely accessible. What began as an area application of machine learning has, within a few years, become a significant instrument of financial fraud, political disinformation, and nonconsensual sexual imagery.
This paper synthesises and critically examines recent legal scholarship on deepfakes and privacy law in India, drawing upon publications from the International Journal of Law, Management & Humanities, the Law Times Journal, Record of Law, and broader academic literature on deepfake governance available through Research gate. It identifies areas of convergence, recurring criticisms, and emerging proposals for legal reform. The analysis suggests that India’s current regulatory response remains fragmented and largely reactive, with significant reliance on intermediary based takedown mechanisms. Existing statutes and regulatory frameworks were not specifically designed to address synthetic media, resulting in important doctrinal, regulatory, and remedial gaps in addressing deepfake related harms to privacy, reputation, and individual autonomy.
The paper comparatively examines the European Union’s General Data Protection regulation (GDPR), Digital Services Act (DSA), and, particularly, Article 50 of the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI ACT). It argues that India may benefit from a more codified, preventive, transparent, and victim centred regulatory framework. The study also identifies areas of divergence within the literature, including the role of copyright and intellectual property law, the adequacy of personality-rights jurisprudence, and the question of whether India should enact a dedicated deepfake statute or instead incrementally amend existing legislation.
The paper concludes with legislative, institutional, judicial, platform-level, and public-facing recommendations aimed at moving India from a largely reactive approach toward a more preventive, rights based, and effective framework for the governance of synthetic media.
- INTRODUCTION
The contemporary digital environment increasingly challenges the traditional assumption that visual and auditory evidence can always be accepted at face value. A video may depict a public official apparently making a statement that was never made; an audio recording may convincingly imitate a bank official; and an individual’s face may be digitally superimposed onto content in which the individual never participated. These developments illustrate the distinctive legal risks posed by deepfake technology, particularly in relation to privacy, reputation, identity, and the authenticity of digital evidence.
Deepfakes are synthetic media, including images, audio, and video, that are generated or manipulated using artificial intelligence and machine-learning techniques to make a person appear to say or do something that they did not actually say or do. Such techniques may include generative adversarial networks (GANs), diffusion models, and other generative AI methods[1]. Technological developments have substantially reduced the cost, technical expertise, and time required to create such material, enabling ordinary users to produce increasingly convincing synthetic content through widely available applications and online tools.
For India, the implications are particularly significant. The country has a large internet and social-media user base, a substantial film and celebrity economy, and growing exposure to AI-enabled voice and video fraud. At present, India does not have a dedicated, comprehensive statute specifically regulating deepfakes. Instead, the legal response is distributed across constitutional privacy jurisprudence, the Information Technology Act, 2000, the Information Technology (Intermediary
Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, the Copyright Act, 1957, and developing personality-rights jurisprudence. These existing legal frameworks may provide remedies for particular harms caused by deepfakes, but they were not specifically designed to address the full range of risks associated with synthetic media[2].
The present study undertakes a comparative synthesis of recent contributions to the legal literature. By which two questions organize the analysis.
- First, what are the principal areas of agreement across the literature regarding the nature of deepfake-related harms, the applicable legal framework, and the direction of legal reform?
- Second, what are the principal criticisms of the existing Indian legal framework, and in which areas do the sources diverge?
This doctrinal component considers the constitutional right to privacy recognised in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India; relevant provisions of the Information Technology Act, 2000, including Sections 66C, 66D, 66E, 67, 67A, and 67B. The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, including the 2025 Amendment addressing synthetically generated information; the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023; the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023; and, where relevant, the Copyright Act, 1957. The comparative component examines the European Union’s GDPR, Digital Services Act, and Artificial Intelligence Act, alongside the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act, 2023 and selected United States right-of-publicity authorities.
[1] Annpurna & Ashok Kumar, Protecting Privacy from Deepfake Technology in India: A Critical Analysis of the Indian Legal Framework with Lessons from the European Union, 9(IV) Int’l J.L. Mgmt. & Humanities 1950 (2026); Deepfakes, AI and the Law: Protecting Privacy and Reputation in India’s Evolving Legal Framework, Law Times Journal (July 31, 2026).
[2] Information Technology Act, No. 21 of 2000, Acts of Parliament, 2000 (India); Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, as amended (India); Digital Personal Data Protection Act, No. 22 of 2023, Acts of Parliament, 2023 (India); Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, No. 45 of 2023, Acts of Parliament, 2023 (India); Copyright Act, No. 14 of 1957, Acts of Parliament, 1957 (India).