When a Face Can Lie: What Deepfakes Teach Us About the Self
Savio Saldanha SJ
20 September 2026
DOI - 10.5281/zenodo.22858238
My
reflection on this topic did not begin with a news article. It began several
months ago reading about what AI-generated images and deepfakes are doing to
people, quietly, in numbers nobody is really counting. Most of what happens
this way never becomes a story. This is especially a serious threat in places
where the law hasn't caught up to the technology, or was never going to move
fast enough to matter to the person it happened to. For every case that gets
reported, there are certainly many more that don't. Both men and women are
targeted this way, though what's done to women more often carries a specific
sexualised cruelty.
Out
of the several cases that I read, one particular case did stay with me while I
was working through this, and I want to use it carefully, because a reflection
needs somewhere concrete to stand. Georgia Horton
(https://bbc.com/news/articles/c75gvyk6d4yo) found out that Ethan Orchard, a
man she had known since college and someone she considered a friend, had taken
her photographs from social media and used artificial intelligence to turn them
into sexually explicit images. He had done the same to two other women he knew.
He was eventually convicted and sent to prison. Georgia decided to speak
publicly about it afterward, not for sympathy, but because she wanted people to
understand that this technology has a dangerous side most people are still
treating as a joke. I'm not going to describe more of what was done to her
mainly because it doesn't need repeating to make the point. What I want to sit
with is something Georgia said plainly: none of this happened because a
stranger attacked her in the street. It happened because someone who knew her,
who she trusted, decided her face and body could be taken and remade into
something she never was and never consented to. The same thing has happened
differently to people this same week some of whose stories will never reach a
court or a headline.
That's
worth pausing on before any philosophy enters the picture. Whatever follows
here isn't an answer to what was done to her, or to any of the others. It's not
meant to make any of it smaller, tidier, or easier to file away. But sitting with
it long enough, an honest question does form: if a person's face and body can
be taken and reassembled like this, entirely without their will, what was
actually stolen? I think we can all agree on one thing as of now, that something
real was taken. The question is what exactly, and what wasn't.
The self isn't what shows up on screen
Centuries
before any of this was technically possible, Descartes tried a version of the
same question in his own mind. Suppose some deceiver could fabricate every
single thing I see and hear. Could I trust anything? He found one thing that
survived: even a total deception needs someone present to be deceived. I
think, therefore I am. Somebody has to be home for a lie to land on. Here
is what Georgia's case actually clarifies about that old argument. Descartes
was only ever certain about his own case, from the inside. The cogito was never
a test for detecting someone else's presence behind a likeness — it says
nothing about whether an image of a person carries that person's thought,
consent, or will. What was done to Georgia is proof of exactly that gap: a
convincing image can be built entirely without the will of the person it
depicts, in direct violation of that will. They used her likeness, but nothing
in them was her choice, her thought, her consent. That distinction changes
nothing about what she suffered. You might think there's nothing more to say
here: a person's likeness was taken, full stop. But it's worth being precise
about what was and wasn't touched. It does name something true and worth
holding onto: whatever was in those images, it was not her lived presence, her
will, or her consent.
What actually can't be copied
Buddhist
thought does not affirm a fixed, permanent, independent self behind our
experience — but that isn't a denial that a person's experience, or the harm
done to it, is real. It still insists that something real is happening in a
person: a stream of actual, lived experience, one moment shaping the next,
carrying memory and consequence forward. That continuous, lived stream is not
something an image can hold, no matter how well it mimics a face. The pictures
Orchard made had no experience, memory, will, or consent of their own. They
were surfaces built from her data, not living centres of experience — with none
of her lived experience, will, or consent actually inside them.
So in that narrow but real sense,
what was copied was never Georgia. What was violated instead was something else
entirely, and it deserves to be named honestly rather than resolved away by a
philosophical technicality.
The wound is real even where the self isn't touched
Here
I want to be direct, because a comforting-sounding argument can do real damage
if it's used carelessly. It would be insensitive to tell Georgia, ‘don't worry,
your true self was never in those pictures,’ as if that settles anything. It
doesn't undo what strangers said about her online. It doesn't undo the
violation of being sexualized without consent, by someone she trusted, for
other men's entertainment. Those are real and specific harms done to a real
person and no metaphysical distinction erases them.
What
I think is actually true is that both things hold at once, without one
cancelling the other: nothing essential about who Georgia is was ever in
Orchard's power to touch or remake, and at the same time he still did something
to her that a court rightly called criminal, that caused her real and lasting
harm, and that deserves anger, not just analysis. A philosophy that only offers
the first half of that sentence isn't consoling anyone rather it's avoiding
her.
A face that makes a claim on you
The
philosopher Emmanuel Levinas spent much of his life on one idea worth slowing
down for. When you actually encounter another person's face, not glance at an
image of it, but meet it, something happens before you've judged anything about
it. The face itself makes a claim on you, Levinas said: something like do
not reduce me to what you can see, I am not yours to use. That claim
doesn't come from any feature you could photograph. It comes from the fact that
a real person always exceeds any image taken of them.
This
is exactly what Orchard's images faked, and exactly what they could never
actually deliver. Every man who looked at those pictures and treated them as an
invitation was responding to something that made no genuine claim on them as an
encounter with Georgia, because nothing was actually there to be encountered —
only data arranged to look like an encounter. That is where I think the deepest
wrong in this crime sits, underneath even the images themselves: it
manufactured the feeling of having met a woman, judged her, and been given
license by her, a whole moral event, when in truth no meeting had happened, and
no license was ever hers to give. Every one of those persons owed Georgia the
restraint that a real face demands, and everyone who didn't give it failed a
test the fake image was specifically built to help them fail.
Being known, not just being seen
Catholic
theology has never located a person's worth in physical resemblance. Genesis
says human beings are made ‘in the image and likeness of God’ (Gen
1:26–27), and the tradition has always read that as naming a capacity for
relationship, intellect, and freedom, not a physical template that could be
copied or corrupted by copying. The Psalmist says it more intimately still: ‘You
knit me together in my mother's womb... my frame was not hidden from you’ (Ps
139:13,15). Before Orchard, before any camera, before anyone else's gaze
fell on her at all, Georgia was already known this way completely by someone no
lie could deceive. Jeremiah hears it as a word spoken before he even existed: ‘Before
I formed you in the womb I knew you’ (Jer 1:5). Isaiah makes the
same claim in a different register, and it is the verse this whole reflection
keeps returning to: ‘I have called you by name, you are mine’ (Is
43:1). That is not a description of how anyone looks. It is a description
of how a person is held.
Paul
pushes the same conviction into the body itself, which matters directly here,
since it was her body that was stolen and misused: ‘Do you not know that
your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit... you are not your own’ (1 Cor
6:19–20). The body is not incidental to the person in Catholic thought the
way it might be in a purely Cartesian picture. But it is not reducible to an
image of it either. The Catechism holds both of these at once: the human
person, ‘willed for its own sake,’ bears within it ‘the divine image’
precisely in the soul's spiritual powers of intellect and will (CCC
1700–1705), and yet the Church has always taught that a person's reputation
is not a trivial thing to protect: to expose someone unjustly, to falsify what
they've said or done, to let others believe something untrue about them, are
named directly as sins against truth and against the neighbour (CCC
2477–2478). What was done to Georgia is not new under a new name; the
Church has always had words for it. It simply now happens at a scale and a
speed her tradition never had to reckon with before.
Vatican
II said something that reads as though it were written with this exact harm in
mind, decades before the technology existed to commit it. Gaudium et Spes
lists, among the acts that ‘poison human society’ and ‘do more harm
to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury,’ whatever
‘is offensive to human dignity’ (GS 27). And in 2024, the Church finally
had to say it in language that names this precisely: the Dicastery for the
Doctrine of the Faith's declaration Dignitas Infinita devotes its
closing section to what it calls ‘digital violence,’ naming
directly the way ‘new forms of violence are spreading via social media,’
including ‘the sharing of images of a sexual nature without consent’ (DI
61–62). This isn't an old doctrine stretched to cover a new problem. It's
the Church watching this exact thing happen and finding it needed a new name
for a very old wound: dignity attacked not by a fist or a word, but by a fabricated
image, at the speed of a share button. Orchard could violate Georgia's privacy,
safety, reputation, and trust — the Church has never pretended those losses are
small. He could not cancel the dignity she carries as a person made in the
image of God.
A fullness that cannot be subtracted
The
Īśā Upaniṣad reaches a strikingly similar insight by an entirely
different road, centuries before either Descartes or the Gospel:
ॐ पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदं पूर्णात्पूर्णमुदच्यते।
पूर्णस्य पूर्णमादाय पूर्णमेवावशिष्यते॥
‘That is full, this is full; fullness comes
forth from fullness. Even when fullness is taken from fullness, fullness alone
remains.’
This
is obviously not identical to the Christian doctrine of imago Dei,
and the two traditions shouldn't be collapsed into one another. Yet both refuse
the same reduction: that a person is exhausted by whatever can be seen,
displayed, or manipulated. Something enormous was taken from Georgia. This
verse doesn't say otherwise. The theft was real, but it never exhausted the person
it tried to define. In other words, there is more to a person than what we see.
The one workable thing
Most
writing about deepfakes stops at feeling uneasy about the technology, whoever
the victim happens to be. Here is something concrete, and it follows directly
from Levinas's point above: before looking at, believing, or sharing an image
that claims to show a real person, ask one question. Has this person actually
consented to be seen this way, or am I about to treat a stolen likeness as if
it were a real encounter with them? If there's any doubt, don't look, don't
forward, don't engage. That single refusal is small, but it's exactly the
discipline Levinas asks of anyone who meets a real face: to answer to the
person, not just to the image.
What's left unresolved
Georgia's
case did end with a conviction, which is more than most victims of this get,
and more than most will ever get. But she was clear that the law still isn't
enough, even where the law exists and works. The tools to do what was done to her
are still freely available, and she said so herself. Somewhere now, the same
thing is being done to someone whose name will never surface, in a country
where no one will be charged, where there may be no law to charge anyone under
at all. I cannot let one filmed, named suffering matter more than the thousands
who may have been affected the same without a voice or a name the world will ever
know. That would be its own kind of selective outrage, the very thing I have
tried to hold myself against throughout this piece. Georgia is not the point,
but a door through which the point became impossible to avoid.
Knowing
that no theft could reach the fullness of who any of them are doesn't undo the
months of fear, or the fact that people looked at fabricated images and felt
entitled to comment on what they'd like to do to another person's body.
Theology can say truthfully what wasn't lost. It can't yet say how, what
actually was lost, safety, trust, the ordinary freedom of existing as an image
online without fear, gets given back. That isn't something an argument
resolves. It's rebuilt, slowly, through better law where law can reach, through
people refusing to look, and through communities choosing to stand with the
person rather than with the image someone else made of them, wherever in the
world that person is, whether or not we ever learn their name.
A
Pastoral Afterword
If these reflections leave you unsettled, uneasy, or even defensive, pause before judging that reaction. Discomfort is not always a sign of error; often it is the first movement of conscience waking up.
To anyone reading this who has been a victim of this technology or in any form however it reached you: nothing above was written to explain your pain away and nothing here asks you to feel less than you do. You are more than the image that was made of you. Not as a comforting slogan, but as the plain truth this whole reflection has tried to hold onto: whatever was taken, copied, or twisted was never the whole of you, and it was never going to be. That doesn't undo what happened. It also doesn't need to be resolved today, or explained fully, or forgiven on any timeline but your own. If what you need right now is simply to be believed and not analysed, that is enough, and this piece was never meant to ask more of you than that.
To anyone reading this who recognises themselves differently, someone who has used this technology, looked at what it made, shared it, laughed at it, or turned to it in a private moment they'd rather not name, even here, this is not an accusation meant to shame you into silence. Shame closes a person off from exactly the kind of honest self-examination that could actually change something. What's offered instead is the same as always: an invitation to look again, gently, at something conscience may already be asking you to look at. Ignatian spirituality holds that God rarely speaks in the loud register of accusation. More often it's the quiet stirring that won't quite let a person settle, the unease that returns after the screen is off, the small resistance to doing again what was done before. That stirring is not your enemy. It may be the most trustworthy voice in the room.
You are not asked here to make a public confession, to relitigate every choice you've made online, or to carry a guilt heavier than what's actually yours. You are asked only to listen, to the person a fabricated image can never fully replace, and to whatever it is in you that already suspected this technology was never as harmless as it felt in the moment.
Remain with the unease, whichever side of it you find yourself on. Pray with it. Let it teach you. At the crossroads of conscience, God does not coerce; God accompanies. And for both the one who was wronged and the one still learning what they've done, that accompaniment is itself a sign that love, when it finally roots itself in truth, has not failed. It is only beginning to be purified.
