In a landmark move, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Abhishek Bachchan have filed a ₹4 crore (approx. $450,000) lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company Google. The legal action comes after several AI-generated deepfake videos of the celebrity couple surfaced online, sparking serious concerns about privacy, personality rights, and AI misuse.
The petition, filed on September 6, 2025, seeks the removal and permanent ban of all deepfake videos that infringe on the couple’s intellectual property rights. The Bachchans have also urged the court to direct YouTube to ensure their images, voices, and likenesses are not exploited by AI technologies or used to train rival AI models.
Targeting Deepfake Channels
The lawsuit specifically mentions a YouTube channel named “AI Bollywood Ishq”, which has uploaded over 259 manipulated videos and amassed 16.5 million views. These videos include fabricated scenarios such as Aishwarya Rai Bachchan with Salman Khan in a pool, and Abhishek Bachchan in falsified scenes of intimacy and anger.
Calling the content “egregious” and “sexually explicit,” the Bachchans stressed that such videos could cause irreparable damage to their reputation and personal lives.
Concerns Over AI Training
The petition also raises alarms over YouTube’s policy that allows creators to give consent for their videos to be used for AI training purposes. The Bachchans argue that this practice is dangerous, as deepfake content misrepresenting celebrities could be multiplied and spread even further by AI systems.
They emphasized 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.”
India’s Legal Gap
Unlike countries such as the United States, India currently lacks clear laws protecting “personality rights.” While some Bollywood celebrities have previously taken legal steps to defend their image, the Bachchans’ lawsuit is one of the most high-profile cases yet at the intersection of AI, digital media, and celebrity privacy.
The case could potentially set a precedent in Indian law and bring much-needed clarity on regulating AI-generated content and safeguarding public figures from misuse.
