Synthetic Deception and the Erosion of Evidentiary Trust: Deepfake Technologies, Identity Crimes, and the Crisis of Legal and Democratic Institutions

The rapid maturation of generative adversarial network (GAN) architectures and diffusion-based synthesis models has produced a class of synthetic media — commonly designated as deepfakes — capable of fabricating audiovisual representations of real individuals with a degree of perceptual fidelity that increasingly exceeds unaided human detection. This paper examines deepfake technologies as a systemic threat to the legal, political, and social infrastructure of identity verification.