Realistic-Looking Fake Porn Videos of Bollywood Celebs Are Finding Millions of Viewers

Vijash, a 29-year-old mechanical engineer from Surat in the Indian state of Gujarat, who preferred to be known by only his first name for this story, believed for the longest time that the videos he was watching that featured his favourite female actor on desi porn websites were straight out of the actor’s bedroom. The “sex video leaked” label on the video also helped contribute to the “authenticity” of the footage. 

The videos Vijash watched can broadly be classified into two categories: those shot on amateur cameras where the actor’s face is not clearly visible, but just enough to create the impression that it is them, and those in which the actor’s face has been digitally morphed over the face of the person in the original video, in other words – deepfakes. While deepfakes usually refer to fake videos made with the use of AI or artificial intelligence, deepfake technology can also be used to manipulate an existing image as well as to create an entirely new one. Audio, too, can be deepfaked to enable voice cloning.

“I knew that the videos in the second category were clearly fake, but they gave me the visual tools to fantasise,” Vijash told VICE. “I can’t fap to erotica or boring prose – I need visuals and these deepfake videos of Bollywood actors provide exactly that.”

Back in 2017, Motherboard, the tech vertical of VICE, was among a handful of publications to first highlight how AI-assisted fake porn was here. The article delved into the terrifying implications of someone using an algorithm to paste the face of Wonder Woman onto a porn video with near-perfect results. In 2017 that was breaking news. In 2022, it’s just another story in the 24-hour news cycle. 

Akshay S. Dinesh, a full-stack software engineer, whose work includes the designing, testing, and implementation of apps, told VICE that the idea of morphing images of popular actors existed even before deepfakes became a thing. 

“People would cut pictures of Bollywood actors [from newspapers and magazines] and paste them over [the faces of] porn stars – this [practice] graduated to Photoshop,” he said. “With deepfake technology, this has reached a more advanced level. People use this tech not just for porn, but also in politics to create memes and more.”

The process of creating Bollywood porn deepfakes, Dinesh explained, is simple and does not require professional expertise.  

“You need the source and destination material. The source is the porn video and the destination is a high-quality image of the Bollywood actor so that the AI can detect the face from different angles,” he said. “Once the material has been processed by the software, both [the image and video] are blended together. There is also some manual editing and tweaking involved, in case there is something blocking the actor’s face or making it look less real.”

He said that the rise of deepfake Bollywood porn can be attributed to the parallel rise of computers equipped with high-end Graphics Processing Units or GPUs, specifically from 2018 when cutting-edge GPUs started flooding the market. New models released earlier this year have specialised processors that accelerate the rendering of graphics, as this tech is being rapidly developed. 

“GPUs have become relatively affordable and easy to access these days because they are also used for bitcoin mining (the process of creating new cryptocurrency), which is on the rise,” he explained. “But it requires some training over a substantial period of time for these computers to correctly identify the faces to be morphed, and to give high-quality output using deep-learning-based models such as generative adversarial networks (GANs).” 

In a country notorious for the idolisation of celebrities, then, it’s only natural that the rise of deepfake tech and its subsequent ease of access would mean an uptick in the number of deepfake porn videos starring famous faces, including Bollywood A-listers Deepika Padukone, Alia Bhatt, and Priyanka Chopra. Deepfake celeb porn videos garner millions of views on average. On a popular porn website, a deepfake video claiming to star Deepika Padukone “blowing” and “getting fucked” has amassed more than six million views. Another nine-second fake video of “topless Kareena Kapoor”  has almost two million views. While a few videos are laughably fake, others look eerily real. One such deepfake starring “Aishwarya Rai Bachchan” had a staggering 15 million views.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, pornographic celeb deepfake videos featuring women far outnumber those featuring men. 

“In a patriarchal society, there is a sanction for the male gaze but not for the female gaze,” said Ravinder Kaur, a professor of sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. “It’s the same reason people were so upset with Bollywood actor Ranveer Singh’s nude cover shoot for Paper Magazine, but are never bothered by similar shoots involving female actors.” 

Kaur added that deepfake videos of Bollywood actors might seem like they make “the inaccessible accessible” for millions of Indians, but their popularity is only a reflection of deeper social biases involving the female body. 

“Bollywood promotes male fantasies much more than it promotes female fantasies,” she explained. “There is a fundamental inequality that structures desire. Also, in a patriarchal society, female desire threatens the social fabric in ways that male desire does not. So, in the real world, women’s [desires] are policed and controlled but female actors can be item numbers because that's not real.”

Beyond these sociological dimensions, there are also prevalent narratives related to power, aggression, and humiliation that can explain the widespread appeal of such videos. 

“Apart from the sexual fantasy, it fulfils one’s innate need to bring down these big stars and humiliate them because most porn is also about humiliation,” Syeda Ruksheda, a psychologist and psychotherapist, told VICE. “It’s the same reason we get entertained by public displays of celebrities' meltdowns. In that sense, such videos both humanise and dehumanise these actors.”

One of the other reasons, Ruksheda said, is also a desire for closure in our films. Mainstream Bollywood films, she added, have the reputation for being famously prudish in the ways they depict sex and intimacy. 

“For many, these fake Bollywood porn videos complete the [story], [viewers] want to seek out the possibilities denied to them, to see for themselves what happened after the scene was cut.”

The market for fake Bollywood porn videos remains popular on channels like Telegram where such videos are divided into categories including skin colour, sex positions, and duration. Shubham Singh, a cyber expert who cracked the Bois Locker Room case, told VICE that in cases not involving celebrities, there is massive extortion, too. But the economics change when it comes to celebrities, whose images are more likely to be (mis)used when it comes to deepfakes, as extortion might not be a viable option. 

“High-end fake Bollywood porn videos, not available on desi porn websites, are sold on Telegram,” he said. And they come cheap. “On average, you can buy 100 GB of data for as little as Rs 500 ($7). You are either provided with a secure, password-protected link or the data is shared on a pen drive.”

The legal battle to contain the scourge of fake Bollywood porn is an uphill one. Gayatri Gokhale Moorjani, an advocate at the Bombay High Court who has worked with various cases related to cybercrime, particularly those affecting women and children, told VICE that there is no concrete Indian law that can act as a legal remedy for those aggrieved. Even the Draft Data Protection Bill was withdrawn by the Indian government last week, as efforts are being made to work on a “comprehensive legal framework.”

“If you are an actor or even a non-celebrity, you have to seek legal remedy from multiple angles,” she said. “You have to make a case under relevant sections under the Indian Penal Code.” 

She explained that aid can also be sought under section 66E of the Information Technology Act, 2000, which deals with the capture and distribution of someone’s intimate images with or without consent, as well as section 66D which is punishment for cheating by personation using a computer. “Personation,” in this context, is legalese for assuming the identity of another person with the intent to deceive. Both these sections are non-bailable offences that attract, at the most, three years’ imprisonment with a fine that may extend to Rs 100,000 ($1,255). 

“We need a combination of technology and legislation if we really want to protect the privacy and security of those affected. Because there is no direct legal remedy for deepfakes, the process becomes both exhausting and cumbersome with little reprieve.”

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