



Mint Explainer: How AI is a threat to the reputation of top influencers and what can be done about it?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In the past month, top influencers Bhuvan Bam, Payal Dhare (aka Payal Gaming), and Slayy Point’s Gautami Kawale and Abhyudaya Mohan have sought legal remedies against their artificial intelligence (AI)-generated images and videos circulating on social media without consent. Some depicted obscene content while others intend commercial misuse of their identity threatening the reputation these creators have built over years.
While Slayy Point and Bam secured takedowns through the Delhi High Court and Maharashtra’s cyber police arrested the maker of Dhare’s AI generated intimate video and made his identity public, none of these creators secured permanent personality rights protections—like podcaster Raj Shamani in November 2025. This gap leaves influencers vulnerable in India’s booming ₹4,500 crore creator economy. At a time, when tech giants including Meta, Google, and X are in a race to improve their AI tools and chatbots, their capabilities of generating sexually explicit deepfakes raise concerns.
Indian government issued a directive to microblogging platform X to crack down on the misuse of its AI platform grok to generate and share “sexualized and obscene" images of women earlier in January. As per a November 2025 report by cyber security firm mcafee, 90% of Indians have encountered fake or AI-generated celebrity endorsements, with victims losing an average of ₹34,500 to such scams. The report further added that 60% of Indians have encountered AI-generated or deepfake content from influencers and online personalities, not just mainstream celebrities.
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