Jair Bolsonaro is under house arrest, sentenced to 27 years in prison for the attempted coup of 2022, and barred by court order from any form of public communication: no social media, no recorded speeches, no interviews. On July 25, at the launch rally of his son Flávio’s presidential campaign in São Paulo, he showed up anyway. Not in person: as an AI-generated avatar, projected on stage, which opened by declaring that “what you are seeing is not me, this is a simulation of my image and my voice created with artificial intelligence.” And then it did precisely what the real Bolsonaro is forbidden to do: it claimed he had been imprisoned and silenced by an “unjust and arbitrary” decision, and asked the crowd to support his son’s candidacy.
Let that sink in. A man legally gagged by the justice system delivers a direct political message to a rally through a digital clone, and his campaign’s defense is that everything was properly labeled. The electoral committee of Flávio Bolsonaro rejected any accusation of wrongdoing, arguing that the artificial nature of the video was explicitly declared at the start, so no voter was deceived. They even compared it to supporters wearing masks of a candidate’s face at rallies. Which is a lovely analogy, except that a rubber mask does not speak with the candidate’s cloned voice, in the candidate’s cloned face, delivering the candidate’s own political message while the candidate is under a judicial gag order.
A group of centre-left parties supporting President Lula has filed a complaint with the Superior Electoral Court, and their argument rests on two distinct violations. First, the court decision that forbids Bolsonaro from communicating publicly: through the avatar, he appears to have done exactly that. Second, Brazil’s electoral rules on artificial intelligence, which are unusually strict: all AI-generated content must be explicitly and visibly flagged, and deepfakes that reproduce or alter a person’s image or voice to help or harm a candidacy are banned outright. According to the complaint, the video falls squarely into the forbidden category, disclosure or not.
And this is where the case gets genuinely interesting, because it exposes a hole in how we have been thinking about synthetic media. For years the entire regulatory conversation has been about deception: deepfakes are bad because they fool people, so the remedy is disclosure. Label it, and the problem goes away. The Bolsonaro avatar demolishes that logic. Here the video announced its own artificiality in the first sentence; whether everyone in that crowd actually registered the disclaimer is another question, and a label does not undo the pull of that face and that voice. But even granting the committee its best case, the harm does not vanish: it just changes name. The harm is not only deception; the harm is circumvention. A personal sanction, the kind of restriction that courts have imposed on individuals for centuries, simply evaporates if the individual can be reconstructed on demand. The ban applies to the man; the message goes on stage anyway.
The Superior Electoral Court has the power to annul Flávio Bolsonaro’s candidacy if it finds the law was broken, though few expect it to go that far. But whatever it decides will become a precedent, and not just for Brazil. If the avatar passes, every gag order, every electoral ban, every judicially imposed silence becomes negotiable: you do not need the person, you need a rendering. The law keeps restraining bodies while politics migrates to simulations that carry the same face, the same voice and the same agenda. Flávio’s entire campaign already runs on his father’s popularity, which he cannot fully use precisely because of the communication ban. The avatar is the workaround made flesh, or rather made pixels. Expect to see a lot more of it, in Brazil and everywhere else, because the incentive is obvious: why obey a silence when you can outsource the speech to a machine that politely reminds everyone it is not you?
Raffaele Di Marzio
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