Personality Rights and AI: Is India Ready for a Comprehensive Legal Framework?

ABSTRACT

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has facilitated the widespread creation of synthetic media, including deepfakes, voice cloning, digital replicas, and AI-generated endorsements.[1] While these technologies present novel commercial and creative avenues, they simultaneously pose unprecedented threats to personality rights through unauthorized identity replication and commercial exploitation.[1] In India, personality rights have developed incrementally through judicial interpretations of constitutional privacy, intellectual property statutes, and common law torts such as passing off, rather than via a dedicated statutory regime.[1] This article examines the adequacy of India’s existing legal framework—including the Constitution, the Copyright Act, 1957, the Trade Marks Act, 1999, the Information Technology Act, 2000, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023—against emerging AI threats.[1] By drawing comparative insights from foreign jurisdictions, it identifies key statutory gaps and proposes actionable reforms to establish a robust, AI-specific personality rights framework in India.[1]

Keywords: Personality Rights; Artificial Intelligence (AI); Deepfakes; Digital Identity; Right of Publicity.[1]

I. INTRODUCTION

The convergence of artificial intelligence, social media expansion, and pervasive digitalization has transformed how personal identity is constructed, distributed, and monetized.[1] Technologies like voice cloning, synthetic avatars, and automated advertisement generation can now replicate an individual’s likeness, voice, and mannerisms with extraordinary precision.[1] Because these AI-generated productions are increasingly indistinguishable from authentic material, they present grave risks to personal autonomy, dignity, reputation, and commercial value.[1] This article investigates whether India’s current legal architecture provides sufficient protection against the unauthorized, AI-driven exploitation of personal identity.[1]

II. UNDERSTANDING PERSONALITY RIGHTS AND EMERGING AI THREATS

1. Conceptual Foundations
Personality rights encompass the protected attributes that form an individual’s unique identity, including their name, voice, likeness, image, gestures, and digital persona.[1] These attributes carry significant personal and commercial value, particularly for public figures and celebrities.[1] Personality rights serve a dual purpose: safeguarding personal dignity and privacy under Article 21 of the Constitution, and enabling individuals to control and exploit the economic value of their persona through the right of publicity.[1] However, the unauthorized collection of biometric data and voice samples for AI training has blurred the boundaries between data privacy and personality rights.[1]

2. Categorization of Emerging AI Threats
• Deepfakes: AI-generated visual or audio content that fabricates an individual’s appearance or speech without consent, leading to identity theft and reputational harm.[1]
• Voice Cloning: Machine learning models trained on minimal audio samples that mimic a person’s vocal tone for deceptive communication or unauthorized endorsements.[1]
• Digital Replicas: Interactive virtual representations of a person’s physical features and expressions, deployed in film, gaming, or metaverses without prior authorization.[1]
• AI-Generated Advertisements: Automated commercial content utilizing a celebrity’s synthesized likeness to mislead consumers and dilute commercial value.[1]

III. EVALUATION OF INDIA’S EXISTING LEGAL FRAMEWORK

1. Constitutional & Statutory Landscape
• Article 21 & Privacy: Reaffirmed in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), Article 21 guarantees informational privacy, yet the Constitution lacks explicit statutory recognition of publicity rights.[1]
• Copyright Act, 1957: Protects original works (e.g., photographs, sound recordings) and grants performers’ rights, but protects the underlying media creator rather than the individual identity depicted.[1]
• Trade Marks Act, 1999: Offers protection for registered names, signatures, and logos, and remedies false endorsement, but fails to protect unregistered identity traits like voice or overall likeness.[1]
• Information Technology Act, 2000: Governs electronic records and intermediary liability but lacks specific provisions for synthetic media or deepfakes.[1]
• Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023: Establishes a consent framework for personal data processing but does not regulate synthetic identity creation or non-data aspects of publicity.[1]

2. Judicial Precedents
Indian courts have incrementally expanded personality protection to fill statutory voids:[1]
• R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu (1994): Linked identity control to the constitutional right to privacy.[1]
• ICC Development (International) Ltd. v. Arvee Enterprises (2003): Established that the right of publicity derives from privacy and inheres exclusively in individuals.[1]
• DM Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. v. Baby Gift House (2010): Applied the common law doctrine of passing off to prevent unauthorized commercial exploitation of singer Daler Mehndi’s persona.[1]
• Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India & Ors. (2023): Adapted personality rights to the AI era by restraining unauthorized digital replication of voice, catchphrases, gestures, and likeness.[1]

IV. COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS & STATUTORY INADEQUACIES

1. Global Regulatory Trends
• United States: Relies on state-level right of publicity statutes and common law to restrain unauthorized AI synthetic media.[1]
• European Union & UK: Utilizes passing off, privacy torts, GDPR data protection mandates, and the comprehensive EU AI Act to enforce transparency and risk mitigation.[1]
• China: Imposes direct preventative obligations through its Deep Synthesis Regulations, mandating explicit consent, mandatory watermarking, and provenance tracing.[1]

2. Core Inadequacies in India
India’s framework remains fragmented across piecemeal statutes and common law doctrines that were not engineered for synthetic identity replication.[1] IP regimes struggle to address synthetic non-original outputs, data protection laws fail to curb unauthorized generative model training, and jurisdictional issues hinder enforcement against anonymous online creators.[1]

V. MERITS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Key Strategic Recommendations
• Dedicated Personality Rights Enactment: Pass a standalone Personality Rights Act defining protected attributes, explicit rights, and standardized civil/criminal remedies.[1]
• Explicit Protection of Digital Identity: Expand statutory definitions beyond names and likenesses to cover voice, biometric indicators, gestures, and AI avatars.[1]
• Robust AI Consent Framework: Require prior, specific, and revocable consent before processing personal attributes for AI model training or commercial outputs, with fair-use exceptions for news, commentary, and satire.[1]
• Strengthened Enforcement & Platform Accountability: Impose strict disclosure, digital watermarking, and fast-track takedown obligations on digital intermediaries and AI developers.[1]
• Specialized Adjudication & Global Co-operation: Establish specialized technology tribunals for rapid dispute resolution and partner with international bodies (e.g., WIPO, UNESCO) for cross-border enforcement.[1]

VI. CONCLUSION

While Indian courts have made commendable efforts to shield individuals from identity theft using common law and constitutional remedies, reactive judicial expansion is no longer sufficient in the era of generative AI.[1] To protect personal dignity, digital autonomy, and commercial value, India must enact a comprehensive, dedicated statutory framework that incorporates AI-specific protections, mandatory consent mechanisms, and robust platform accountability.[1]

REFERENCES

[1] Mehul Nishaant, Personality Rights and AI: Is India Ready for a Comprehensive Legal Framework? (Comprehensive Analysis of AI-Generated Content, Judicial Precedents, and Statutory Reforms, 2026).