Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Abhishek Bachchan have reportedly filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company Google. The Bollywood couple sought Rs 4 crore (around USD450,000) in damages. The legal move comes after a series of their alleged AI-generated deepfake videos allegedly appeared on the platform, after a recent Delhi High Court order, which aimed at protecting Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan`s personality rights.
Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai file a legal lawsuit
In the legal petition, filed on September 6, the couple requested the removal and permanent ban of videos that infringe upon the couple’s intellectual property rights. The Bachchans have also asked the court to order YouTube to implement measures that discourage their videos from being used to train rival AI models, citing rising concerns over AI misuse in content creation.
According to legal papers reviewed by Reuters, the lawsuit aims at “egregious” and “sexually explicit” AI-generated content. The couple argue that YouTube should introduce safeguards so that any content misusing their names, voices, or images cannot be exploited by artificial intelligence. They contend that current platform policies allow for further misuse as AI technologies evolve.
The couple specifically referred to a YouTube channel named AI Bollywood Ishq, which allegedly has over 259 videos featuring manipulated clips. The account has garnered more than 16.5 million views. One of their most widely viewed video allegedly shows Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Salman Khan in a pool. Similarly, another one shows Abhishek Bachchan in fake scenarios, such as suddenly kissing an actress or reacting angrily to AI-altered scenes involving his wife.
In their petition, the actors highlighted the risk of such content being used in AI model training, which could further escalate the spread of infringing videos. They noted, “Such content being used to train AI models has the potential to multiply the instances of use of any infringing content, i.e. first being uploaded on YouTube, being viewed by the public, and then also being used to train.”
The lawsuit also questioned YouTube’s policy, which allows creators to permit the platform to use uploaded content for AI training. The Bachchan couple say this could cause a lot more fake videos that wrongly depict or misuse people. They maintain that “allowing creators to consent to their videos being used to train AI models is dangerous, because content that misrepresents them could eventually be multiplied by AI itself.”
Personality rights in India
Notably, India, unlike some jurisdictions in the United States, currently lacks specific laws safeguarding personality rights. In recent years, a few of Bollywood and South Indian personalities have taken a legal route to assert these rights in Indian courts. However, the Bachchans’ action is one of the most significant and high-profile cases involving the intersection of celebrity, AI-generated content, as well as privacy rights in India.
The petition also highlights the potential for repeated harm if such AI-generated deepfakes are left unchecked. The Bachchans noted in their filing, “Such content being used to train AI models has the potential to multiply the instances of infringing use – first being uploaded on YouTube and viewed by the public, and then also being exploited for AI training.”
