Deepfakes as a threat to honor, dignity, privacy and public safety: legal mechanisms of counteraction

This article examines the legal risks that deepfakes pose to honour, dignity, privacy, the right to one’s image,
business reputation and public safety in the Republic of Kazakhstan. The problem is framed as a new means of
harming individuals and public order through synthetic audio, photographic and video content, rather than an
isolated technological defect. Sources comprise Kazakhstan’s Constitution, Civil and Criminal Codes, Code of
Administrative Offences, the Laws “On Artificial Intelligence” and “On Online Platforms and Online Advertising”,
international instruments, and EU, US and UK legal approaches. Formal legal, comparative, systemic and doctrinal
methods and legal modelling are employed. Existing safeguards are fragmented: addressing defamation, privacy
violations, fraud and dissemination of false information, they do not fully encompass synthetic impersonation. A
sequential framework from detection to restoring victims’ rights is proposed, with limits on using detection results
as digital evidence. The author proposes a differentiated model: civil remedies for urgently halting dissemination
and removing harmful deepfakes; priority application of existing offences and development of targeted criminal-law
criteria for non-consensual intimate deepfakes, using minors’ images in sexualised contexts, fraud, extortion and
impersonation seriously threatening public safety; and specific platform obligations without duplicating existing
labelling requirements.

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