Forced Semblance: Kant, Deepfakes, and the Crisis of Public Judgment

Contemporary society faces a crisis of appearances, characterized by a breakdown in the ways knowledge, trust, and public perception are established. AI-generated images and deepfakes do not simply contribute additional misinformation; they undermine the evidential status of appearances themselves, rendering the reliability of “what we saw” increasingly precarious and, consequently, threatening the foundations of democratic judgment. This challenge is evident not only in epistemic and ethical debates but also in emerging legal frameworks. Proposals to grant individuals copyright-style control over their own appearance indicate that the issue concerns the public standing of appearance, rather than isolated incidents of deception. This paper contends that Kant’s aesthetics—particularly his underdeveloped concept of Schein (semblance, or appearance-as-appearance)—offers a more precise diagnosis of the threat posed by deepfakes. In the Critique of Judgment, aesthetic judgment is described as “merely reflective,” proceeding without determinate criteria and responding to appearances rather than demonstrable facts. However, such judgment is not a matter of private preference; it asserts a claim to universal communicability (sensus communis). The stance of judgment is fundamentally oriented toward others, open to contestation, and situated within a public space of reasons. Interpreted in this manner, Kant’s aesthetics is not merely a subsidiary theory of pleasure, but an account of how meaning becomes shareable in the absence of a definitive decision-procedure. Deepfakes exploit this structure by producing what may be termed forced semblance: an engineered “as-if” that replicates the public authority of images while removing the cues and practices necessary for contestable judgment. The resulting harm is not limited to occasional deception; rather, distrust becomes structurally rational, leading to cynicism as a default stance. Consequently, the public use of reason is deprived of a stable field of appearances necessary for meaningful argumentation. This development signifies a shift in political agency, characterized not only by false belief but by the erosion of the foundational conditions required for claims to be assessed, shared, and disputed. The paper is structured in three parts. First, it reconstructs the concept of Schein in Kant’s aesthetics, distinguishing it from empirical appearance (Erscheinung) and from illusion or deception (Täuschung), and demonstrates how Schein designates a normative structure of reflective attention. Second, it analyzes deepfakes as forced semblance: synthetic appearances engineered to elicit assent before conceptual validation, thereby undermining the reflective posture that Kant identifies as essential to communicable judgment. Third, it considers policy implications, arguing not for a Kantian “deepfake detector,” but for the establishment of norms that protect the conditions of reflective public judgment. These include provenance and disclosure standards, platform design modifications to reduce frictionless virality, and likeness-rights frameworks aimed at preserving contestability rather than guaranteeing certainty. If the deepfake phenomenon constitutes a crisis of judgment, then the protection of political agency necessitates safeguarding the forms of appearance that enable meaning to become publicly shareable.