For years, Indian personality-rights litigation followed a familiar pattern: a celebrity's name or image appeared in an unauthorised advertisement or hoarding, and the courts applied passing-off and publicity-rights principles built up since cases like ICC Development v. Arvee Enterprises and Titan Industries v. Ramkumar Jewellers. Generative AI has changed the shape of the problem.
In Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India & Ors. (Delhi High Court, 2023), the plaintiff was not just dealing with a misused photograph — he was dealing with AI-generated deepfake video, cloned voice, and morphed images circulating across dozens of unrelated platforms simultaneously. The Delhi High Court's response was to grant a sweeping, omnibus injunction that explicitly named AI tools, face-morphing and GIFs as covered conduct, rather than limiting protection to traditional photographic misuse.
The Court's reasoning is worth sitting with: it recognised that widely available AI tools have lowered the barrier to convincing impersonation to almost nothing, and that a legal framework built around one-off photographic misuse could not keep pace with content generated at scale. That recognition was reinforced a year later in Jaikishan Kakubhai Saraf (Jackie Shroff) v. The Peppy Store & Ors. (Delhi High Court, 2024), which extended the same logic to an AI chatbot trained to mimic a celebrity's voice and mannerisms.
What neither case resolves is the harder question for ordinary individuals — not public figures with the resources to seek an omnibus injunction, but private citizens whose likeness is used in a deepfake. India still has no standalone statute addressing AI-generated impersonation; courts have so far reasoned from Articles 19(2) and 21 of the Constitution, alongside common-law passing-off and privacy principles from Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India. Until legislation catches up, the practical protection available depends heavily on how quickly a claimant can get before a court — and how clearly they can show commercial value in what was taken.
