Bachchans vs YouTube: Celebrity privacy at stake

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Abhishek Bachchan have filed a ₹4 crore lawsuit against YouTube and Google over AI-generated deepfake videos.

Transcript

00:00The Bachchan's Have Had Enough

00:04Aishwarya Raya Bachchan and Abhishek Bachchan have filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its

00:08parent company Google seeking Rs 4 crore in damages. The couple accused the platform of

00:13hosting and enabling the spread of what they call egregious and sexually explicit AI-manipulated

00:18videos that violate their personality rights. One widely viewed video allegedly shows Aishwarya

00:23Raya Bachchan and Salman Khan in a pool. At the same time, another depicts Abhishek Bachchan

00:28and fabricated scenarios suddenly kissing an actress or reacting angrily to AI-altered scenes

00:33involving his wife. These clips, the Bachchan say, are not real but AI-generated deepfakes.

00:38The legal petition filed on September 6 not only demands the removal and permanent ban

00:42of such content but also raises a bigger alarm that these videos could be used to train AI models,

00:48multiplying the misuse, citing one particular YouTube channel, AI Bollywood Ishq,

00:52which hosts over 259 manipulated clips with more than 16.5 million views. The Bachchan's

00:59argue that YouTube's current policies allow dangerous loopholes. They point to the platform's

01:03options that allow creators to consent to their videos being used by AI training, warning that

01:08this could exacerbate the fake content crisis. Their petition reads, such content being used to train

01:14AI models has the potential to multiply instances of infringing use first being uploaded on YouTube,

01:19then viewed by the public, and later exploited by AI training itself. The lawsuit underscores a major

01:24legal gap. India does not yet have specific laws protecting personality rights, unlike the United

01:29States. Still, this case has emerged as one of the most high-profile battles between Bollywood

01:34celebrities, artificial intelligence, and digital privacy. For now, the Bachchan's fight isn't just

01:40about protecting their image, it's about setting a precedent in a world where AI deepfakes are blurring the

01:45lines between truth and manipulation.