NEW DELHI | A doctored video showing a young Bollywood actress wearing sportswear and showing ample cleavage and posted on social media has sparked calls for regulation of artificial intelligence in India.
Actress Rashmika Mandanna told her 4.7 million subscribers on the X platform (formerly Twitter) that she was “really hurt” when she discovered her face on another woman’s body in a doctored video.
The video, which was widely shared on social media, outraged government officials and the Bollywood cinema community.
“As a community, we urgently need to address this before more of us are affected by identity theft,” wrote Rashmika Mandanna, calling everyone’s vulnerability to identity theft “extremely frightening.” Misuse of artificial intelligence (AI).
“Today, as a woman and an actress, I am grateful to my family, friends and fans who are my defense and support system,” the actress added.
“But if this had happened to me when I was in school or university, I really can’t imagine how I would have coped with this situation,” she continued.
India’s Information Technology Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said the fake videos were “harmful and harmful” forms of disinformation.
They must be “processed by the platforms” as required by Indian law, he wrote on X on Monday.
Like most parts of the world, AI is unregulated in India. On the other hand, the minister said, Indian law requires social networks to process and remove any disinformation within 36 hours of being reported.
An old video featuring Zara Patel, an Anglo-Indian Instagram influencer, was used to combine her body with the actress’ head.
Zara Patel claimed not to have been involved in this manipulation and said she was “deeply disturbed and upset”.
“I worry about the future of women and girls who now have to be even more afraid to appear on social networks,” emphasized the influencer in a message to her 450,000 Instagram subscribers.
Fake videos are spreading online around the world and damaging reputations. According to a 2019 study by Sensity, a Dutch artificial intelligence company, around 96% of these videos consist of manipulated pornographic images that harm women.
In 2018, a famous journalist and critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the victim of a harassment campaign that mass-circulated videos manipulated to show her naked.
Social networks, which are extremely popular in India, spread a wide range of false information that has fueled political and religious divisions and may have sometimes led to bloody riots.