NEW DELHI: Bollywood power couple Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan have filed separate, high-profile lawsuits against Google’s YouTube in the Delhi High Court, seeking urgent legal protection against the proliferation of AI-generated deepfakes and the platform’s policies that allow such content to train rival AI models.
The actors’ lawsuits, filed in early September, target the unauthorized and often “egregious” use of their likeness in deepfake videos, many of which they allege are sexually explicit, fictitious, or damage their reputation.
The Core of the Legal Challenge
While the lawsuit demands the removal of hundreds of existing infringing videos—a request the Delhi High Court has already partially acted upon by ordering the takedown of 518 specific links—the most significant part of the Bachchans’ plea is the challenge to YouTube’s content sharing policy.
The couple is seeking a court order to compel Google to implement safeguards that ensure videos uploaded to YouTube that infringe their personality rights cannot be used to train other artificial intelligence platforms without proper consent.
The court filings, which span over 1,500 pages, argue that YouTube’s current policy—which allows creators to opt in to share their videos for training AI models from companies like OpenAI, Meta, and xAI—is deeply concerning.
“Such content being used to train AI models has the potential to multiply the instances of use of any infringing content… and then also being used to train,” the filings stated, citing the risk of AI models learning to propagate “untrue” or negative information about the actors.
“Egregious” Content and Growing Misuse
The lawsuits detail numerous examples of misuse, including AI-manipulated videos that allegedly show:
- Abhishek Bachchan’s face superimposed onto scenes involving a kiss with another actress.
- Fictional, AI-generated depictions of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan dining with a former co-star while Abhishek watches angrily.
The actors have sought $450,000 (approx. ₹4 crore) in damages and a permanent injunction against the unauthorized commercial exploitation of their names, images, voices, and personas.
A Landmark Case for Personality Rights
The Bachchans’ legal action is being viewed as the most significant challenge yet regarding “personality rights” in the age of generative AI in India, a country which currently lacks explicit, dedicated legislation on the matter.
It follows a trend of prominent Indian celebrities, including Amitabh Bachchan (Abhishek’s father) and Anil Kapoor, who have previously sought and won court injunctions to protect their identity from misuse.
With India being a critical and vast market for YouTube, the outcome of this case, which is next scheduled for hearing on January 15, 2026, could set a global precedent for how tech platforms are made accountable for AI-generated content and the subsequent data that is used to train machine learning models.
