Pornographic Deepfakes: Legal-evidential and social impact in Ecuador

Abstract

Pornographic “Deepfakes” represent a growing phenomenon of falsified videos or images generated by artificial intelligence, is the direct result of technological advances, directly transgresses the right to privacy, with the generation of videos of sexual content without the consent of the victim. These manipulations started in the year of 2017, were evolving causing inherent legal risks in particular with the privacy rights of women. The study was conducted with a research method, qualitative approach, documentary, bibliographic, dogmatic, descriptive, comparative containing a non-experimental design. It focuses on comparing different legislations in order to understand the evidentiary difficulties and contemporary legal challenges in Ecuador, since this represents a legal obstacle and entails serious consequences in the future. The findings establish that “deepfakes” indeed violate the right to privacy, affecting the privacy of individuals and their reputation, as well as highlighting the evidentiary difficulty, which poses significant challenges to identify the origin and attribution of responsibility, due to scarce Ecuadorian regulations, and the lack of specialized experts in AI, which highlights the urgent need to address this issue from a legal and technological point of view.