Delhi High Court Grants Aishwarya Rai Bachchan Injunction Against Misuse of Image

In a significant ruling addressing the dark side of artificial intelligence, the Delhi High Court has granted actor Aishwarya Rai Bachchan protection from the unauthorized use of her identity. The court issued a strong injunction preventing various online entities from exploiting her name, image, or likeness, explicitly including misuse through AI, deepfakes, and other machine learning tools.

Justice Tejas Karia affirmed that such exploitation violates the actor's fundamental rights to privacy and dignity. The court recognized that AI-generated content, such as the sexually explicit deepfake videos and images cited in the case, not only damages a person's reputation and goodwill but also falsely implies endorsement. The order compels Google to remove offending URLs and directs the IT Ministry to block them, setting a firm precedent against the digital misuse of a person's persona in the age of AI.

"Personality Rights of individuals, simply put, entail the right to control and protect the exploitation of one's image, name, likeness or other attributes of the individuals' personality, in addition to the commercial gains that can be derived from the same. Personality Rights can be located in the individuals' autonomy to permit or deny the exploitation of the likeness of other attributes of their personality," the Court said.

Justice Tejas Karia affirmed that such exploitation violates the actor's fundamental rights to privacy and dignity. The court recognized that AI-generated content, such as the sexually explicit deepfake videos and images cited in the case, not only damages a person's reputation and goodwill but also falsely implies endorsement. The order compels Google to remove offending URLs and directs the IT Ministry to block them, setting a firm precedent against the digital misuse of a person's persona in the age of AI.

"In other words, the unauthorised exploitation of the attributes of an individual's personality may have two facets - first, violation of their right to protect their personality attributes from being commercially exploited; and second, violation of their right to privacy, which in turn leads to undermining their right to live with dignity," it added.

On the other hand, her husband and actor Abhishek Bachchan has moved the Delhi High Court seeking protection of his publicity and personality rights and requesting that websites and platforms be prohibited from using his image, likeness, persona, or any fake videos, including sexually explicit material.

He has also sought an action against the websites selling t-shirts and merchandise featuring him.