Known for her candidness on topics like pressures of nepotism, public scrutiny and grief, actor Janhvi Kapoor has now opened up about the darker side of fame: AI-generated deepfakes.
While she tries to brush them off as an occupational hazard, the actress admitted the impact is still heavy.
During a podcast, she recalled a particularly traumatising incident from her mid-teens, revealing she first discovered a morphed image of herself on an adult website when she was only 15.
“I don't know if it was a deepfake, but it was something like that. I saw a picture of me on a porn site. We had IT class in school, and boys used to go on those sites for fun. My pictures were on there. And this was in school. So that was a weird experience," she said.
Janhvi added, “At some point, I was like this is the cost you have to pay. There is no morality in a lot of these things with social media."
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“I am not at peace with it. There are visuals of me out there, even shared by official news pages, which are completely AI. I have never worn those clothes or been photographed like that."
Emphasising how this affects her work, she said: “It gets circulated as if it's something I've put out. That creates a certain kind of impression. If tomorrow I tell a director I'm not comfortable wearing something, someone can pull up those pictures and say, ‘But you've done this before.' Even if they don't say it, it makes you think."
“It upsets me, of course,” she said. But over time, she has found ways to deal with it. “I feel like I don't have that much of a voice to complain. There's this attitude — you've got so much in life, thoda seh lo, don't complain. So, I don't think my voice has that credibility yet. There will be backlash, and it might take away from the cause," she expressed.
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