Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan have filed separate lawsuits in the Delhi High Court against YouTube and its parent company Google, demanding Rs 4 crore as damages. As per a report in Reuters, the two are seeking a permanent injunction to stop YouTube from hosting any content that misrepresents them, misuses their voice or spreads AI-generated deepfake videos.
The petition was filed last month on September 6 and it states, “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.”
The lawsuit is reportedly over 1,500 pages long and mentions about sellers of unauthorised merchandises, like posters, mugs, stickers and even fake autographed photos of the two actors. Along with that, it also provided various links and screenshots of YouTube videos that allegedly show sexually explicit and fictitious AI-generated content involving them.
In one such deepfake video, Abhishek is seen kissing a female actor while another one shows Aishwarya having dinner with Salman Khan as Abhishek stands behind. The lawsuit has mentioned the YouTube channel, 'AI Bollywood Ishq', that has published over 259 such videos which have 16.5 million views.
The matter was heard in Delhi High Court last month which directed Google to submit written responses to all the concerns. The next hearing in the matter is set to take place next year on January 15. Meanwhile, the court has ordered a takedown of over 518 links that were mentioned in the petition by the couple, stating that they caused both financial harm and reputational damage to them.