एआई के युग में व्यक्तित्व अधिकार: पहचान, नकल और कानून की विलंबित प्रतिक्रिया
I. “What If It Was You?” From Digital Imitation to Courtroom Battles
Imagine a video of you goes viral overnight. The face is unmistakably yours, the voice sounds like you, the gestures are eerily familiar. Only, you never recorded it. The clip shows you endorsing a betting app, making sexually explicit remarks, or delivering a communal speech. There is no easy way to explain to family, employers or the public that it is not you at all, but an AI‑generated imitation.
For Indian celebrities, this is no longer hypothetical. Recent suits by Aishwarya Rai Bachchan in Delhi and by Asha Bhosle, Suniel Shetty and Akshay Kumar in Bombay describe exactly this arc, faces pasted on obscene or communal deepfakes, voices cloned to sing new songs, names used to sell merchandise or to lure users to gambling and astrology platforms. Singer Kumar Sanu’s case before the Delhi High Court goes further, mapping an entire ecosystem of AI voice generators, GIF libraries, app stores and e‑commerce sellers built around his persona without his consent.
These disputes mark a shift. Earlier Indian cases about misappropriation of persona tended to involve simple passing‑off an actor’s photograph on a poster, a cricketer’s caricature on a mug. The new matters are different in scale and sophistication. They involve AI platforms that allow any user to “generate” a celebrity’s voice on demand, chatbots built around particular stars, and anonymous operators of social‑media accounts who churn out deepfakes at industrial speed.
Courts have responded by explicitly naming what is at stake, Personality rights. They describe these rights as the ability of an individual, celebrity or otherwise to control the use of their name, image, likeness, voice and other distinctive attributes, particularly against commercial exploitation and degrading misuse. Personality rights thus emerge not as a luxury of fame but as a legal response to technologies that make imitation effortless and identity fragile.
II. What Are Personality Rights and Who Can Claim Them?
Personality rights can be understood along two axes. The first is economic. Celebrities invest years in building a public image that brands value precisely because it signals trust, quality and aspirational identity. Courts acknowledge that endorsements, appearances and licensing of persona are major sources of livelihood, uncontrolled use of that persona through unlicensed merchandise, fake “manager” websites or AI voice models erodes that economic value and distorts the market for genuine endorsements.
The second axis is dignitary. Misuse of identity is not always about money. Deepfakes that place Akshay Kumar in a fabricated, communally charged film trailer, or that show Suniel Shetty and his family in obscene contexts, are treated by the Bombay High Court as serious intrusions upon privacy and the right to live with dignity under Article 21(No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law). In Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s case, the Delhi High Court notes that unauthorised use of her name and image not only causes commercial detriment but also harms her reputation, integrity and dignity.
The platform‑driven digital economy magnifies both harms. AI tools collapse the cost of high‑quality imitation. A voice‑cloning website or a deepfake app does not merely allow a fan to experiment, it allows anyone to scale up misappropriation of identity across hundreds of videos and posts. Followers, views and engagement become a new currency. Even where there is no direct sale of products, courts are willing to recognise that defendants gain commercially from the attention and traffic generated by misusing a celebrity’s persona.
Against this backdrop, who can invoke personality rights? In practice, the current jurisprudence is celebrity‑centric. Plaintiffs are able to point to decades‑long careers, national awards, millions of social‑media followers and major brand endorsements to show that their indicia, name, face, voice, mannerisms have acquired a distinctive and commercially valuable identity. This evidentiary threshold is straightforward for stars but less so for emerging creators, influencers or ordinary individuals whose images are used in AI pornography or scams.
Yet the reasons courts give for protection are control over identity, protection from humiliation, and prevention of deceptive endorsements are not conceptually limited to the famous. If a deepfake of a student or doctor causes similar reputational and psychological harm, the logic of personality rights ought to apply. The risk, if courts and lawmakers are not careful, is that personality rights harden into a doctrine that works best for those already endowed with fame and resources.
III. Where Does Indian Law Place Personality Rights?
India has no dedicated personality‑rights statute. Protection emerges through a patchwork of constitutional, common‑law and statutory routes.
First, courts are increasingly grounding personality rights in Article 21. After Puttaswamy recognised privacy as a fundamental right, High Courts have had little difficulty treating unauthorised exploitation of persona especially through obscene or communal deepfakes as a violation of both privacy and the right to live with dignity. This constitutional framing justifies strong ex parte injunctions, judges emphasise that reputational damage and psychological injury cannot be undone by damages awarded years later.
Second, the cases sit comfortably within classic passing‑off and unfair‑competition principles. Where defendants sell products or services using a celebrity’s name or image, the courts find that consumers are likely to be misled into assuming some endorsement or association, resulting in diversion of goodwill. This is the backbone of orders restraining sale of posters, T‑shirts, mugs and wall art featuring Asha Bhosle, Suniel Shetty, Akshay Kumar or Kumar Sanu on e‑commerce platforms and third‑party websites.
Third, copyright and moral‑rights provisions offer additional hooks. In the Asha Bhosle and Kumar Sanu orders, the Bombay and Delhi High Courts highlight that AI‑generated songs that imitate a singer’s voice and style may distort or mutilate the artist’s performances, infringing performers’ moral rights under the Copyright Act. Even when the lyrics and composition are new, cloning a distinctive voice to produce entire catalogues of “fake” performances raises both personality‑rights and copyright concerns.
Finally, personality‑rights enforcement now leans heavily on intermediary liability frameworks. The 2026 amendments further tighten this regime by mandating labelling and traceability of synthetically generated information and by compressing takedown timelines for such content. Courts routinely direct platforms such as YouTube, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, GIF and sticker services, app stores and marketplaces to remove infringing content, delist products and disclose Basic Subscriber Information of anonymous uploaders. These directions are justified by reference to the IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, which require platforms to act against impersonation, obscenity and misleading content once notified. Misuse of images and voice samples plainly involves personal data, and large platforms will need to reconcile DPDP obligations with personality‑rights claims. For now, however, the heavy lifting is being done by Article 21, passing off, copyright and IT rules rather than by data‑protection analysis.
IV. Identity in the Algorithmic Age: The Way Forward
The emerging jurisprudence is impressive in how quickly it has absorbed new technologies. Orders are no longer confined to a static set of links, they build in dynamic mechanisms under which plaintiffs can keep notifying fresh infringing content, and intermediaries are bound to act within forty‑eight hours or to explain their refusal. Personality rights thus become a vehicle for crafting agile remedies in a fast‑moving online environment.
Yet the law remains largely reactive. Relief arrives once reputational damage has already spread across platforms. There were, until very recently, few ex ante standards for AI providers who train models on celebrity data, or for platforms that design features enabling easy impersonation, even after the 2026 IT Rules amendments, those standards remain narrow and implementation‑dependent. Without clearer duties of care, watermarking synthetic media, labelling AI‑generated content, deploying stronger verification for high‑risk uploads, the burden of policing identity will continue to fall on individuals forced into expensive litigation.
A significant regulatory shift since early 2026 is the executive’s decision to bring AI‑generated content under a formal intermediary framework through the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2026. For the first time, these rules define “synthetically generated information” to cover realistic AI‑generated or AI‑altered audio, visual and audio‑visual content that could pass off as genuine, and require major platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and Facebook to ask uploaders whether material is AI‑generated and to deploy automated tools to cross‑verify before it goes live. If content is synthetic, it must carry a prominent disclosure label and persistent metadata or unique identifiers that cannot be stripped away, and intermediaries now face sharply reduced response windows, sometimes as short as three hours to comply with lawful takedown orders, including where deepfakes misrepresent a real person’s identity or voice and intersect with offences under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, POCSO or other criminal statutes. These changes do not displace the need for civil personality‑rights actions and judicial remedies, but they do signal a move away from a purely reactive model towards one in which platforms shoulder clearer ex ante duties around labelling, traceability and timely intervention against identity‑based AI misuse.
There is also the question of boundaries. Personality rights inevitably intersect with free speech, journalism and artistic expression. Courts acknowledge that celebrities may be the subject of legitimate news, criticism, satire and parody, they do not grant a veto over all uses of their name and image. The hard task is to distinguish between a biting caricature or biopic, which may be protected, and a deepfake endorsement or obscene montage, which is not. Current orders tend to resolve that tension pragmatically, content that misleads the public about endorsement, or that seriously invades privacy and dignity, is restrained, commentary, humor and reporting that do not cross those lines are left untouched.
Going forward, Parliament will almost certainly need to clarify the scope and limits of a statutory right of publicity or personality, its relationship with privacy and copyright, and the defenses available for news, research and artistic uses. At the same time, courts can continue to push for preventive safeguards in their interim orders, insisting that platforms build better detection tools for deepfakes, require provenance information for AI‑generated media, and cooperate meaningfully with victims beyond mere takedown.
Ultimately, the recent cases suggest that personality rights in India are moving from a narrow concern with fame to a broader question of how law recognises and protects identity in a synthetic age. AI has made it possible to fabricate you without your involvement. The challenge for the legal system is to ensure that the person whose face, voice or name is being replicated retains not just a share in the economic value that flows from that identity, but something more fundamental: the ability to say no.
