A deepfake is a piece of audio, video or image content that has been generated or digitally altered using AI to depict a real person saying or doing something they never actually said or did, typically by mapping one person’s face, voice or likeness onto footage or audio that was not originally theirs.
There is no Canadian statute that uses the word “deepfake.” The term surfaces instead inside laws written for what a deepfake can be used to do. The Competition Bureau’s discussion paper on AI and competition addresses it directly under deceptive marketing, warning that “this technology could be leveraged to make deceptive marketing conduct more convincing, using ‘deepfake’ (digitally altered) voices, images, or videos”, noting elsewhere that “AI eases the ability to scale such conduct.” The Bureau frames this as one way existing deceptive-marketing law reaches a new technique, not as a rule about the technique itself.
That pattern — ordinary law applied to a new production method — is the honest way to describe where Canadian law currently sits on deepfakes generally, including outside marketing: personal-information rules, court-evidence rules and passing-off can each apply once a synthetic recording does something those laws already have a name for. The full mechanics of that patchwork, province by province, are set out at Deepfakes and Canadian law.
A marketing contractor produces a video ad using an AI-cloned version of a well-known local news anchor’s voice, without the anchor’s permission, to narrate a product claim the anchor never reviewed. The video itself is the deepfake — the voice is synthetic and attributed to a real identifiable person. Whether it is unlawful does not turn on the fact that AI made it; it turns on whether the ad is deceptive, whether the anchor’s personality or image rights were used without consent, and what the resulting marketing claim actually says.
See also: what is synthetic media, what is a digital watermark, is making a deepfake illegal in Canada.
Verifying whether a specific piece of media is genuine, altered or synthetic before relying on it is examination work — ai-due-diligence covers how that check gets done.
