The following article first appeared in the News & Analysis section of Littler Mendelson’s website. It is reposted here with permission.
The landscape of workplace harassment has evolved beyond physical offices, after-hours texts and off-site events.
Employers now face a sophisticated and deeply unsettling threat: deepfake technology. Once the domain of tech experts, AI-powered tools that generate hyper-realistic but fabricated videos, images, and audio are now widely accessible—even to those with minimal technical skills.
As of 2023, 96% of deepfakes were sexually explicit, overwhelmingly targeting women without their consent.
By 2024, nearly 100,000 explicit deepfake images and videos were being circulated daily across more than 9,500 websites. Alarmingly, a significant portion of these featured underage individuals.
While image-based sexual abuse is not new, AI has dramatically amplified its scale and impact. In the workplace, deepfakes can be weaponized to harass, intimidate, retaliate, or destroy reputations—often with limited recourse under traditional employment policies.
For HR leaders, legal counsel, and executives, the question is no longer if deepfakes will affect your workforce but when, and how prepared your organization is to respond.
Deepfakes are synthetic media, i.e., content created or manipulated using machine learning, particularly deep learning models trained on large datasets of images, voices, or videos,...
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