Why Guyana’s cyber laws need an AI renaissance

Aug 15, 2026 Letters

Dear Editor,

We have officially crossed the uncanny valley, and Guyana’s political landscape is dangerously exposed. As our nation navigates an unprecedented economic boom and heightened geopolitical visibility, the democratisation of generative artificial intelligence has birthed a new era of frictionless fabrication.

Today, creating a hyper-realistic depiction of a Guyanese public official takes mere seconds. We are no longer dealing with crude Photoshop jobs; AI is now routinely weaponised to generate fabricated audio and video of public servants engaging in illicit, humiliating, or inflammatory acts, instantly broadcast across local Facebook pages and WhatsApp groups.

In the face of this epistemic crisis, legislative inertia in Georgetown is no longer an option. It is imperative that our national laws—specifically the Cybercrime Act of 2018 and our older, colonial-era defamation frameworks—be urgently reexamined and edited to hold individuals accountable when they misuse AI to sabotage public officials.

Historically, Guyanese law and the Constitution rightly protect free expression and political satire. However, generative AI breaks the traditional bounds of parody through sheer verisimilitude. In a society historically vulnerable to ethnic and political polarization, a synthesised WhatsApp voice note of a minister uttering a racial slur or accepting a bribe does not provoke thought; it provokes unrest. Yet, perpetrators continually hide behind antiquated legal shields, claiming their deepfakes are mere “digital jokes.”

To understand the urgency of this statutory modernisation, we need only look at the global fallout of the past few months. In February 2026, France was rocked by the “Élysée Synthesis,” a scandal in which an AI-generated video depicted the French Prime Minister accepting a cash bribe. Before the video was debunked, markets dipped and riots sparked in Paris. In response, the French parliament swiftly passed a Digital Integrity Law, which explicitly criminalises the unconsented, malicious biometric cloning of public figures.

Similarly, during South Korea’s April 2026 parliamentary elections, operatives utilised voice-cloning AI to release audio files of a prominent candidate utilising ethnic slurs. Rather than relying on sluggish civil defamation suits, Seoul updated its electoral laws to establish “algorithmic accountability,” holding individual uploaders directly liable for synthetic election interference.
By contrast, Guyana’s current legal framework is floundering in the face of this technology. Public figures are paralysed by traditional defamation standards that require proving actual malice and measurable damages. These standards were designed for print newspapers and traditional broadcasters, not a decentralised internet where anonymous prompt-engineers can generate bespoke defamation at scale.

Updating our laws to hold AI abusers accountable is not an assault on our constitutional right to free speech; it is the preservation of a shared civic reality. Parliament must introduce specific legal categories for “malicious synthetic defamation,” mandate digital provenance protocols, and ensure that those who maliciously engineer algorithmic falsehoods face strict liability.
Democracy in a rapidly developing, diverse nation requires a baseline of empirical truth to function. If we refuse to edit our laws to punish those who use AI to poison that well, we are not protecting free expression. We are simply subsidising deception.

Respectfully,
Philip Inshanally

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