Suddenly seeing your own face look lifelike in images depicting fictional situations, or hearing your own voice say things you’ve never actually said: This idea is unsettling. With generative AI, it’s now incredibly easy to create deceptively realistic media content that places real people in fictional contexts. In the public sphere, malicious deepfakes in particular have attracted a great deal of attention, as there is widespread outrage over the misuse of generative AI: the term “deepfakes” is associated with fraud, manipulation of the public, and pornographic or intimate depictions created without the consent of the people depicted. Of course, the same technology can also be used for comparatively harmless purposes: In art and culture, artists are experimenting with these new possibilities, protected by artistic freedom and taking particular delight in what deviates from the real and the expected—and is not intended to be “fake” in the sense of deception. And in the fast-paced, economically driven production of visual and audio materials for advertising or in the entertainment industry, AI technologies not only save time and enable new workflows but also open up a potential market for personality traits that serve as the basis for AI-generated content—even beyond the deaths of the people whose appearances this content mimics. Do these cases pose a challenge for the law and the justice system?
Viktoria Kraetzig is a private lecturer in civil law, business law, and information law at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main; as a legal scholar, she focuses extensively on issues related to copyright and media law, among other topics. In this Digitalgespräch, the expert explains how the legal profession approaches the phenomenon of “deepfakes” and whether existing legal tools are sufficient to contain the threat they pose. She describes which legal interests are affected by the debate surrounding deepfake technologies and which issues remain contentious among legal scholars. Together with hosts Marlene Görger and Petra Gehring, Kraetzig discusses how the new AI-generated images differ from previous examples in advertising or satire, what role taste and personal tolerance thresholds play—and why law enforcement in digital spaces is reaching its limits.
Episode 74: Digitalgespräch with Viktoria Kraetzig of the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, 27th of January 2026
Further Information:
To a report about the Verdict of the Landgericht Berlin on the immitation of a Dub-voice using AI at heise online: https://www.heise.de/news/Persoenlichkeitsrecht-Synchronstimme-ist-vor-KI-Nachahmung-geschuetzt-10623565.html
To a report about the Hirschhausen-Verdict on the Website of the WDR: https://presse.wdr.de/plounge/wdr/unternehmen/2025/03/20250328_hirschhausen_urteil.html
To Viktoria Kraetzigs Profile on the Website of the Goethe-Universität: https://www.jura.uni-frankfurt.de/122384174/ContentPage_122384174
all episodes of Digitalgespräch
The podcast is in German. At the moment there is no English version or transcript available.