DEEPFAKES, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND NIGERIAN LAW: IS THE LAW READY FOR SYNTHETIC REALITY?

Abstract

Artificial intelligence has quietly closed the gap between imagination and evidence. A video can now show a person saying words they never spoke, endorsing a product they have never seen, or committing an act they never committed. In February 2026, the Nigeria Data Protection Commission joined more than sixty other global data protection authorities in a joint statement warning of the misuse of artificial intelligence systems that generate realistic images and videos of identifiable people without their consent. That warning is the immediate trigger for this article, but the underlying question is older than the technology itself. Can Nigerian law keep pace with synthetic reality? This article interrogates that question across five doctrinal fronts: defamation, privacy and data protection, impersonation, the wider cybercrime regime, and the law of evidence. It argues that Nigeria has assembled a serviceable but incomplete legal patchwork, one built for a world of forged documents and stolen passwords rather than fabricated faces and cloned voices, and it proposes a coordinated legislative and institutional response.