Actor Janhvi Kapoor, in a recent podcast, recalled the traumatic experience of coming across a morphed, sexually explicit image of herself while she was in school.
In a conversation with Raj Shamani, Janhvi said that she was just 15 when the incident occurred. While attending an IT class at school, she realised that male classmates were looking at a pornographic website. To her horror, the site featured a deepfake-style image of her face morphed onto someone else’s body.
“I remember I was in my IT class and I saw boys in my class looking at this site and there was a photo of me on it,” she shared. Janhvi described the experience as isolating, noting that at such a young age, she felt she had to “rationalise” the lack of morality on social media because of her family’s fame.
Janhvi also spoke about how the problem of deepfakes has only increased with the rise of Artificial Intelligence. “I am not at peace with it. There are visuals of me out there, even shared by official news pages, which are completely AI. I have never worn those clothes or been photographed like that,” she said.
The actor noted that even reputable news pages occasionally share AI visuals of her in outfits she has never worn. This, she says, becomes a professional threat. “It gets circulated as if it’s something I’ve put out. That creates a certain kind of impression. Suppose tomorrow I go to a director and I say, ‘Listen, I am not comfortable wearing this,’ they can point to a morphed image and say, ‘But you’ve done it before,” she added.
Several actors across the film industry have spoken out against the growing misuse of AI. Alongside Janhvi Kapoor, stars like Rashmika Mandanna have flagged viral morphed videos, while Aishwarya Rai Bachchan reportedly explored legal options after explicit AI-generated content surfaced online. Anil Kapoor has also taken legal action to safeguard his personality rights in the digital space. Globally, actors such as Scarlett Johansson have raised concerns about how easily deepfake technology can be misused.