India's film stars are building a legal wall against artificial intelligence, one court order at a time — and the Delhi High Court has become the unlikely front line of entertainment's fight over who owns a famous face.
The court is set to rule on a plea by actor Vijay Deverakonda against AI-generated content and fake endorsements using his identity, the latest in a cascade of personality-rights cases. Recent decisions have protected a lengthening list of public figures — actors Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Kajol, Nagarjuna, Anil Kapoor and Salman Khan among them, alongside cricketers, entrepreneurs and podcasters — restraining unauthorised commercial use of their names, images, voices and likenesses, and ordering obscene deepfake material taken down.
Kajol's interim order earlier this year illustrates the courts' reasoning: Justice Jyoti Singh held that a star's personality must be protected from misuse through AI and deepfake technology, directed platforms to remove pornographic manipulations, and made clear no one may commercially exploit the actor's identity without consent. The bench has been equally careful to carve out satire, art, commentary and news reporting — the free-speech boundary that keeps personality rights from swallowing legitimate expression.
The threat is concrete and commercial. Voice clones front fake investment ads; faces are grafted onto endorsements for products their owners have never used; non-consensual intimate imagery circulates faster than takedowns. Each generation of tools is cheaper and more convincing than the last, and India's courts — lacking a single personality-rights statute — have been assembling the doctrine case by case, star by star.
Hollywood is fighting the same war with different weapons: union contracts, state publicity laws, and proposed federal legislation. The Delhi court's approach — swift interim injunctions, platform obligations, dignity as well as property — is being watched by entertainment lawyers well beyond India, because the economics are identical everywhere. A famous identity is a licensing business; AI turned counterfeiting it into a cottage industry.
Deverakonda's order, when it lands, will add one more brick. The wall's architects know its limit: courts can restrain misuse within their jurisdictions, but the deepfakes are made everywhere. Still, as the orders accumulate, so does the precedent — and somewhere in that pile of injunctions, the global entertainment industry is writing its first real law of the synthetic age.
The doctrine emerging from Delhi has a distinctive shape that legal scholars are now comparing across jurisdictions. Where American law treats the right of publicity mostly as property — assignable, economic, concerned with endorsement value — the Indian orders speak equally of dignity: the right not to have one's face placed in obscene fabrications is framed as a personal wrong, not merely a commercial one. That distinction matters for remedies, because dignity claims justify the rapid interim takedowns the court has been willing to order against unnamed "John Doe" defendants and the platforms that carry them.
The limits are equally instructive. The court has protected the famous because the famous can litigate; the deepfake economy's real victims — private individuals, often women, whose images are manipulated without any commercial context — cannot retain senior counsel to establish their rights one injunction at a time. Legislators in more than one country are now studying the Delhi model precisely because case law, however fast it accumulates, cannot scale to a harm produced by software.
Until statutes catch up, the star cases do double duty: they are both remedies for the individuals and the visible precedent that tells platforms, advertisers and AI companies where the lines are being drawn. Bollywood's most bankable names are, in effect, financing the legal infrastructure of everyone's synthetic-media rights.
