The Delhi High Court has upheld the personality rights of Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan after the latter approached the court raising objections to unauthorised use of her name, images and AI-generated content, according to legal news portal Live Law.

Justice Tejas Karia, in an order restraining impersonation of the actress through technological tools including artificial intelligence, observed that such misuse could cause financial loss to the actress, besides loss of dignity, reputation and goodwill.

“In other words, the unauthorized exploitation of the attributes of an individual's personality may have two facets – first, violation of their right to protect their personality attributes from being commercially exploited; and second, violation of their right to privacy, which in turn leads to undermining their right to live with dignity,” he said.

“Personality Rights of individuals, simply put, entail the right to control and protect the exploitation of one's image, name, likeness or other attributes of the individuals' personality, in addition to the commercial gains that can be derived from the same. Personality Rights can be located in the individuals' autonomy to permit or deny the exploitation of the likeness of other attributes of their personality,” he added.

Granting an ex parte ad interim injunction, the court restrained the defendants from using Rai’s full name or an acronym ‘ARB’, her image, likeness or any other aspects of her persona for commercial or personal gain, through technologies such as artificial intelligence, generative artificial intelligence, machine learning, deepfakes, face morphing, on any medium and format.

The Court further directed Google LLC to take down the URLs as identified in the suit within 72 hours and to also file in a sealed cover or password protected document all the Basic Subscriber Information of the owners or operators and sellers of goods. It also directed the MeiTY to issue necessary directions to block and disable all the URLs within seven days.

Concluding, Justice Karia observed, “Any infringement of the plaintiff's personality rights, while causing confusion amongst the members of the public regarding endorsement or sponsorship of a product or service by the plaintiff, will also lead to dilution of the plaintiff's reputation and goodwill.”