Decoding personality rights in the age of AI, Pg7

Key Highlights:

• Actors Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan sued Google and YouTube in the Delhi High Court over AI-generated videos infringing on their personality rights.
• The lawsuit seeks compensation and safeguards against using such content to train future AI models.
• Personality rights include control over one's name, image, likeness, and voice, protecting against unauthorized exploitation.
• Landmark cases like Amitabh Bachchan v. Rajat Nagi (2022) and Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India (2023) have recognized and protected personality rights in India.

Detailed Insights:

• AI technologies like deepfakes blur the lines between authenticity and deception, creating vulnerabilities in personality rights.
• Globally, approaches to personality rights vary: Europe uses a dignity-based model, the U.S. a property-based one, and India a hybrid approach.
• In India, personality rights stem from Article 21 of the Constitution, affirmed in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), but lack specific codification.
• The EU AI Act, 2024, designates deepfake technologies as high-risk, mandating transparency and labeling to protect individual rights.
• UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, 2021, stresses that AI must not exploit individuals, providing a rights-based framework.
• Scholars advocate expanding personality rights to include style and persona appropriations to protect creators from AI’s exploitative data use.
• India needs legislation that explicitly defines personality rights, enforces AI watermarking, establishes platform liability, and promotes global collaboration.

Key Concepts Involved:

• Personality Rights: The right to control one’s name, image, likeness, voice, and other identifiers of identity.
• Deepfakes: AI-generated content that swaps faces or voices, often used to propagate misinformation or enable extortion.
• AI Watermarking: Embedding information within AI-generated content to verify its origin and authenticity.