Opinion | AI Will Be Judged By What It Does To Indian Women

Updated: Oct 13, 2026 16:34 pm IST Published On Oct 13, 2026 16:31 pm IST Last Updated On Oct 13, 2026 16:34 pm IST

Published On Oct 13, 2026 16:31 pm IST

Last Updated On Oct 13, 2026 16:34 pm IST

Something unusual has been happening in our High Courts these past few weeks. One after another, some of the most recognised women in India have walked in, asking judges to scrub fake versions of themselves off the internet. In early September, the Bombay High Court ordered the removal of AI-generated deepfakes of Shruti Haasan. Shilpa Shetty sought urgent relief against obscene AI content carrying her face. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan went to the Delhi High Court over the misuse of her image by AI tools. The courts moved quickly. But sit with the uncomfortable part. These are women with fame, money and the best lawyers in the country, and even they must now fight to keep their own faces. What about the woman who has none of those things?

I have met her. As district collector of Hazaribag and later Garhwa, I sat with self-help groups in tribal villages: women under a tree, counting small savings to the last rupee, repaying loans with a discipline most corporations cannot match. One evening, a woman who sold lac and mahua told me the price the trader had given her. It was a fraction of what her produce fetched three districts away. She lacked neither intelligence nor industry. She lacked information, and the means to ask. She is on every page of my eight books on artificial intelligence, because she, not the actress, is the person this technology will finally be judged by.

For Indian women, this technology wears two faces, and the ugly one arrived first. Researchers who audited deepfake videos found that 96........

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