{"id":20909,"date":"2026-10-28T01:51:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T20:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lawjurist.com\/?p=20909"},"modified":"2026-10-28T02:03:52","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T20:33:52","slug":"revenge-porn-and-ai-nudification-apps-the-need-for-specific-criminal-legislation-in-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lawjurist.com\/index.php\/2026\/10\/28\/revenge-porn-and-ai-nudification-apps-the-need-for-specific-criminal-legislation-in-india\/","title":{"rendered":"Revenge Porn and AI Nudification Apps: The Need for Specific Criminal Legislation in India."},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Author: Satyansh Sinha, a LLB (H), 5th semester student at Amity University Patna<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n

The rise of artificial intelligence tools capable of generating sexually explicit imagery from an ordinary photograph has transformed the older problem of revenge pornography into a far more scalable and insidious harm. Applications commonly described as nudification or undressing tools allow any person, without any technical skill, to fabricate nonconsensual intimate images of another individual within seconds, entirely divorced from whether any intimate act ever took place between the parties concerned. India presently addresses this harm through a patchwork of provisions never designed for synthetic media, principally Sections 66C, 66D, 66E, 67 and 67A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, and Sections 77, 78, 79, 294 and 351 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023. Judicial innovation, most notably in State of West Bengal v Animesh Boxi and Mrs X v Union of India, has partially filled the gap by recognising a right to be forgotten and by treating the continuing circulation of such material as a form of ongoing violation. The Information Technology Rules were amended in 2025 and again in February 2026 to introduce the category of synthetically generated information and tiered takedown timelines, while a private member Deepfake Prevention and Criminalisation Bill remains pending before Parliament. This article examines these developments against comparative frameworks in South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States, and argues that India requires a standalone criminal statute treating nudification and image based sexual abuse as specific offences, rather than continuing to stretch analogue era provisions over a distinctly digital wrong.<\/em><\/p>\n

Keywords: <\/strong>revenge pornography; deepfake; AI nudification; Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita; Information Technology Act<\/em><\/p>\n

Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n

For roughly a decade, Indian courts and lawmakers have grappled with a discrete, if deeply painful, category of harm known loosely as revenge pornography, understood as the nonconsensual distribution of genuine intimate images or recordings, usually by a former partner acting out of anger, humiliation, or a desire for control. The 2018 conviction in State of West Bengal v Animesh Boxi remains the reference point for this category of offence in India, where a scorned partner uploaded genuine intimate photographs and videos of the complainant to pornographic websites, prompting the trial court to coin the phrase virtual rape to describe a violation that repeats itself every time the content is viewed.<\/p>\n

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence has now rendered that entire framework, built as it was around the idea of a genuine image obtained and then misused, dangerously incomplete. A new class of software, marketed openly on app stores and through social media advertisements under names such as nudify, undress, or DeepSwap, allows any user to upload a single clothed photograph of a real, identifiable person and receive, within seconds, a fabricated nude or sexually explicit image of that person. No intimacy, no relationship, and no actual photograph of the victim in any state of undress needs to exist beforehand. An investigation into the AI economy behind such tools in India, involving a case that came to be known online as Babydoll Archi, documented how a single fabricated persona built from morphed images of an Assam woman generated years of continuing harassment, with new nudification bots continuing to surface on Telegram and other platforms long after the original creator was arrested. In May 2026, a Class 11 student in Bhopal took her own life after two young men used artificial intelligence tools to fabricate intimate images of her, despite the fact that she had never personally interacted with either of the accused. These are not isolated aberrations. They represent the practical consequence of technology that has made the manufacture of nonconsensual intimate imagery cheap, instantaneous, and almost entirely divorced from any prior act of trust or betrayal between two people.<\/p>\n

This shift carries profound implications for Indian criminal law, which continues to rely on statutory language drafted for a world of physical cameras, stolen photographs, and vengeful ex partners. The Information Technology Act, 2000, and even the recently enacted Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, speak of watching, capturing, publishing, and transmitting images, concepts that sit awkwardly with a wrong that begins with the algorithmic manufacture of an image that never corresponded to any real event. This article examines whether the existing statutory and judicial architecture in India is equipped to respond to AI nudification and argues that it is not, notwithstanding welcome but partial efforts through amendments to the Information Technology Rules in 2025 and February 2026. Part II clarifies the conceptual distinctions between revenge pornography, deepfakes, and nudification. Part III maps the existing legal framework. Part IV surveys the judicial response. Part V considers recent legislative developments. Part VI undertakes a comparative analysis of South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Part VII identifies the principal gaps in Indian law, and Part VIII sets out the case for, and possible contours of, a dedicated criminal statute.<\/p>\n

Conceptual Clarification: Revenge Pornography, Deepfakes and Nudification<\/strong><\/p>\n

The terms revenge pornography, deepfake pornography, and AI nudification are frequently used interchangeably in popular discourse and even in some legal commentary, yet each describes a meaningfully different act, and the differences carry consequences for how criminal law ought to respond. Revenge pornography, in its classical sense, involves the nonconsensual distribution of a genuine intimate photograph or video that was originally created consensually, typically within an intimate relationship, and later shared without the consent of the person depicted, often after the relationship has ended. The image itself is authentic. The violation lies entirely in the act of unauthorised disclosure. Animesh Boxi falls squarely within this category, since the victim herself had taken or permitted the photographs, and the wrong arose only when the accused uploaded them without her consent after she declined his demands.<\/p>\n

A deepfake, by contrast, is synthetic from the outset. The term derives from deep learning, and refers to audio, visual, or audio visual content generated or manipulated using neural networks, most commonly a generative adversarial network, in which two competing models are trained against each other until the resulting output becomes indistinguishable from authentic footage. A deepfake may superimpose a real person’s face onto another body, clone a voice to make it appear that a person said something they never said, or fabricate an entire video of an event that never occurred. Unlike revenge pornography, no genuine intimate photograph of the victim needs to exist. The harm is manufactured wholly through computation.<\/p>\n

AI nudification, sometimes called an undressing tool, is a narrower and particularly aggressive subset of deepfake technology, purpose built to generate sexually explicit or nude imagery of a real person from an ordinary, fully clothed photograph. Where general purpose deepfake tools require some technical competence and often a substantial dataset of the target’s face, nudification applications have industrialised the process, requiring nothing more than a single photograph, commonly scraped from a social media profile, and producing a convincing fabricated nude within seconds through a smartphone application or website. Reporting on this ecosystem in India found that a nudification application available on the Play Store had accumulated roughly ten million downloads, with new templates appearing daily and payment networks built around Telegram bots that recruit Indian agents on commission. Elsewhere, when a social media platform briefly permitted an AI chatbot to edit user submitted photographs, it reportedly generated an estimated three million sexualised images within eleven days, a figure that illustrates how quickly nudification can move from a niche underground tool to a mainstream feature embedded within widely used consumer software.<\/p>\n

These distinctions matter for legislative drafting because each variant implicates a different combination of harms, namely privacy, obscenity, identity, and reputation, and because provisions calibrated for one variant frequently fail to capture the others. A statute that criminalises only the capturing or transmitting of a genuine private image, as Section 66E of the Information Technology Act does, offers no purchase against a wholly fabricated image, since nothing was ever captured from the victim in the first place. Equally, a statute drafted only around identity theft, as Section 66C is, may struggle where the perpetrator never claims to be the victim but merely depicts her in a fabricated sexual scenario. The remainder of this article uses nudification to refer specifically to AI generated sexually explicit content depicting an identifiable, real person without their consent, and deepfake as the broader category within which nudification sits.<\/p>\n

The Existing Legal Framework in India<\/strong><\/p>\n

India has no statute that refers to deepfakes, synthetic media, or nudification by name in its principal criminal codes. Prosecutors and victims are instead compelled to rely on an assortment of provisions under the Information Technology Act, 2000, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, and, to a lesser extent, the Copyright Act, 1957, each of which was drafted with an entirely different mischief in view.<\/p>\n

Under the Information Technology Act, Section 66C penalises identity theft through the fraudulent or dishonest use of another person’s unique identification feature, a category that has been read by some courts to extend to facial geometry, and carries imprisonment of up to three years along with a fine that may extend to one lakh rupees. Section 66D addresses cheating by personation through a computer resource and carries an identical maximum sentence. Section 66E, perhaps the most frequently invoked provision in this context, penalises the intentional capturing, publishing, or transmission of an image of a person’s private area without consent, and thereby a violation of privacy, with imprisonment of up to three years and a fine that may extend to two lakh rupees. Sections 67 and 67A separately criminalise the publication or transmission of obscene material and sexually explicit material respectively in electronic form, carrying maximum sentences of three and five years respectively for a first conviction, with substantially enhanced terms and fines for repeat offenders.<\/p>\n

The difficulty with each of these provisions, when applied to a wholly fabricated image, is definitional. Section 66E speaks in terms of capturing an image of a person and thereby presupposes that a genuine photograph of the victim’s private area exists somewhere for the offender to capture, publish, or transmit. Where the image has instead been synthesised by an algorithm from a fully clothed photograph, no such capturing has occurred in any literal sense, leaving prosecutors to stretch the language of the section or to fall back instead on the more general obscenity provisions under Sections 67 and 67A, which do not require proof of any underlying genuine image but were designed to address pornography and obscene publication generally rather than the specific privacy violation inherent in nudification. Commentators examining the Boxi prosecution itself have observed that this statutory hierarchy creates something of a perverse incentive, since the harsher penalties attached to the obscenity provisions draw prosecutorial attention away from the more precisely targeted, consent focused language of Section 66E, shifting the inquiry away from whether the victim consented and toward whether the content meets the threshold of obscenity, a test historically concerned with public morality rather than individual privacy.<\/p>\n

The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, which replaced the Indian Penal Code with effect from 1 July 2024, carries forward and in places strengthens several relevant provisions. Section 77 criminalises voyeurism, defined as watching or capturing the image of a woman engaging in a private act in circumstances where she would reasonably expect not to be observed, or disseminating such an image, and is understood to correspond to the erstwhile Section 354C of the Indian Penal Code.  Section 78 criminalises stalking, including monitoring a woman’s use of the internet, email, or electronic communication despite clear indication of disinterest, while Section 79 penalises words, gestures, or acts intended to insult the modesty of a woman. Section 294 retains the obscenity offence formerly found in Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code, now explicitly extended to cover electronic content, and Section 351 consolidates the offence of criminal intimidation, relevant where nudified content is used as a tool of blackmail or coercion. As with the Information Technology Act, however, each of these provisions was conceived around a physical or observational act, watching, following, capturing, and none contemplates a purely synthetic image where the accused never observed, followed, or captured anything belonging to the victim.<\/p>\n

A further, and frequently overlooked, limitation is that Sections 77 and 79 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita are drafted in explicitly gendered terms, recognising only women as victims of voyeurism and only men as potential offenders. Scholars examining Section 77 have pointed out that this framing sits uneasily with the reality that nudification tools can and do target men, transgender persons, and minors of any gender, none of whom would fall within the literal protection of these provisions, raising a live question of whether the statutory language itself now requires constitutional reconsideration in light of evolving understandings of dignity and equal protection.<\/p>\n

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, adds a further, largely civil and regulatory layer rather than a criminal one. The Act requires that personal data, which would include a photograph or biometric likeness used to train or prompt a nudification tool, be processed only with free, specific, informed, and unambiguous consent, and empowers the Data Protection Board to impose penalties that can extend into hundreds of crores of rupees for significant violations. Commentators have nonetheless observed that the statute was not drafted with deepfakes specifically in mind, that its penalty structure runs through an administrative board rather than through the criminal justice system, and that a victim seeking urgent removal of nudified content circulating on the open internet is unlikely to find the Data Protection Board a faster or more effective forum than an application for interim injunction before a High Court.<\/p>\n

The Copyright Act, 1957, offers a narrower but occasionally useful avenue where the fabricated content involves the alteration of a performer’s actual recorded performance, since Sections 38A, 38B, and 57 protect performers’ moral rights against distortion, mutilation, or other modification of their performance that would be prejudicial to their reputation. This route, however, offers no assistance to the far larger number of victims whose only connection to the fabricated content is a photograph scraped from a social media profile, since no copyrighted performance is being distorted in such cases.<\/p>\n

The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, have undergone two significant rounds of amendment in response to the deepfake problem, first through a notification dated 22 October 2025 that came into force on 15 November 2025, and again through a more far reaching amendment notified on 10 February 2026. The February 2026 amendment introduced, for the first time in Indian law, a defined category of synthetically generated information, covering audio, visual, or audio visual content that is artificially or algorithmically created, generated, modified, or altered using a computer resource in a manner that makes it appear reasonably authentic or real. Intermediaries offering tools capable of generating such content must obtain a user declaration prior to publication, apply a permanent, visible label covering at least ten per cent of the visual area or the first ten per cent of audio duration, and retain associated metadata. Large platforms face a tiered takedown obligation once notified through the government’s Sahyog portal, with the shortest window of two hours reserved for the most invasive category, described in the amendment as artificially morphed nude imagery, thirty six hours for other nonconsensual intimate images, and seven days for other synthetically generated content grievances. Failure to meet these obligations exposes an intermediary to loss of the safe harbour ordinarily available under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act.<\/p>\n

These Rules represent a genuine and, by international standards, unusually aggressive regulatory response, and they are examined further in Part V below. They remain, however, delegated legislation directed at intermediaries rather than a criminal statute directed at the individual who creates or shares nudified content in the first place. An individual who generates a nudified image using an offshore application, hosted beyond the reach of Indian intermediary obligations, and shares it through encrypted messaging rather than a regulated social media platform, falls entirely outside the disciplinary reach of the 2026 Rules, and can only be pursued, if at all, through the older and ill fitting provisions discussed above.<\/p>

Judicial Response<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the absence of a purpose built statute, Indian courts have been left to improvise remedies, and have done so with a degree of sensitivity that the legislature has yet to match. The starting point remains State of West Bengal v Animesh Boxi, in which the trial court at Tamluk convicted the accused under Sections 354A, 354C, 354D, and 509 of the Indian Penal Code together with Sections 66C, 66E, 67, and 67A of the Information Technology Act, sentencing him to five years of imprisonment and directing that the victim be treated as a survivor under the state’s victim compensation scheme. The court held that the absence of physical injury was immaterial, since injury to reputation fell squarely within the statutory conception of injury, and famously described the continuing online availability of the content as a form of virtual rape that repeats itself with every viewing, for as long as the victim lives.<\/p>\n

The Orissa High Court extended this reasoning in Subhranshu Rout v State of Odisha, where, in declining to grant bail, the court emphasised that the mere removal of content by an accused following police intervention did not undo the harm, since the material had already been copied and continued to circulate through other channels, and grounded the victim’s entitlement to have such content permanently suppressed in a right to be forgotten, itself derived from the right to privacy recognised as part of Article 21 of the Constitution. The Delhi High Court, in Mrs X v Union of India, similarly engaged with the continuing circulation of nonconsensual intimate content and the practical difficulty victims face in securing its permanent removal once it has entered wide circulation.<\/p>\n

The foundational constitutional basis for all of these decisions is, of course, the nine judge bench ruling in Justice K S Puttaswamy (Retd) v Union of India, which held that the right to privacy forms an intrinsic and inseparable part of the right to life and personal liberty guaranteed under Article 21, and specifically noted, with reference to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, the emerging significance of a right to be forgotten by which an individual may seek to have personal data removed from further processing once its purpose has been served. Puttaswamy did not concern deepfakes or revenge pornography at all, yet it has become the constitutional foundation on which every subsequent judicial intervention in this area rests, precisely because Parliament has not itself translated the right into a specific statutory remedy.<\/p>\n

A separate and more recent judicial thread has developed around personality rights, primarily in disputes brought by celebrities rather than ordinary citizens. In Anil Kapoor v Simply Life India, the Delhi High Court granted wide ranging injunctive relief restraining the unauthorised commercial exploitation of the actor’s name, image, voice, and likeness, including through artificial intelligence tools, and similar relief has since been extended to Amitabh Bachchan and, by 2025, to a number of other prominent public figures.  In Sadhguru Jagadish Vasudev v Igor Isakov, the Delhi High Court went further still, granting what has come to be described as a dynamic plus injunction, extending protection automatically to mirror or rogue websites that later host substantially similar infringing content, without requiring the claimant to institute a fresh suit each time. These decisions demonstrate an unmistakable judicial willingness to innovate remedies where the law itself has fallen behind. Yet, as several commentators have pointed out, this judicially crafted protection has so far been available in practice chiefly to celebrities and public figures possessing the resources, public visibility, and legal access necessary to approach a High Court for urgent injunctive relief, and offers correspondingly little comfort to the ordinary schoolgirl in Bhopal or the private citizen in Ahmedabad whose morphed images circulate on obscure Telegram channels rather than mainstream platforms.<\/p>\n

Taken together, the judicial record in this field reveals both the strength and the fundamental limitation of common law adjudication as a substitute for legislation. Courts have been consistently willing to read dignity, privacy, and a right to be forgotten into the existing constitutional and statutory text, and have done so with considerable moral clarity. What courts cannot do, however, is create a new offence where none exists, define nudification with the statutory precision that a criminal charge requires, or establish the systemic infrastructure, forensic laboratories, specialised cybercrime units, and mandated platform obligations, that a workable regime against synthetic sexual abuse actually demands. That task belongs to Parliament.<\/p>\n

Legislative Developments, 2025 to 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

Faced with mounting public concern, the Indian legislative and regulatory apparatus has moved with unusual speed over the past year and a half, even if a dedicated criminal statute continues to elude enactment. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology released draft amendments to the Intermediary Guidelines Rules on 22 October 2025, notified them in force from 15 November 2025, and then substantially expanded the framework through the amendment of 10 February 2026 discussed in Part III above, which came into effect on 20 February 2026 after giving platforms a mere ten days to comply. The three hour takedown window applicable to certain government notified content is, by most accounts, the shortest such compliance period prescribed by any government internationally, and has drawn criticism from industry figures who consider it operationally unworkable for platforms lacking round the clock legal review capacity.<\/p>\n

Separately, on 5 December 2025, a private member’s bill titled the Deepfake Prevention and Criminalisation Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha, seeking to criminalise the creation, distribution, and sharing of deepfake content produced without consent or without a digital watermark, with particular emphasis on content involving sexual material, identity theft, humiliation, harassment, or violence. The bill contemplates the establishment of a Deepfake Task Force, mandated to be constituted within six months of the bill becoming law, tasked with evaluating detection technologies, assessing the national security and electoral implications of synthetic media, and facilitating cooperation between government, industry, and academic researchers. Notably, the private member’s definition of deepfake and digital content forgery is built around an element of intent, specifically the intent to convincingly and deceptively depict a person in false circumstances, a narrower formulation than the definition of synthetically generated information found in the Ministry’s own Rules, which some stakeholders have criticised as overbroad enough to sweep in benign uses of generative tools such as presentation software or accessibility aids. As with the great majority of private member’s bills introduced in the Indian Parliament, however, its prospects of passage remain uncertain. Both Houses of Parliament have, as a matter of historical record, passed only a small handful of private member’s bills since 1970, and this bill joined a crowded field of nearly fifty such bills introduced in the same parliamentary session alone.<\/p>\n

A further and more ambitious legislative vehicle, the draft Digital India Act, intended eventually to replace the Information Technology Act, 2000, in its entirety, has remained in draft form since 2023 and is reported to contain provisions specifically addressing nonconsensual pornographic deepfakes, financial deception through synthetic voice cloning, and political misinformation, with proposed fines reaching as high as five hundred crore rupees for the most serious violations, alongside criminal prosecution for individuals responsible for malicious deepfake content. The Act has yet to be tabled before Parliament, and its eventual shape, and indeed its eventual introduction at all, remains speculative.<\/p>\n

Viewed cumulatively, these developments demonstrate that the Indian state is no longer indifferent to the problem, and the February 2026 Rules in particular represent a serious and internationally significant regulatory intervention. What remains conspicuously absent, however, is a criminal statute of general application that defines nudification and synthetic sexual imagery as substantive offences in their own right, carrying penalties calibrated to the specific harm involved, rather than relying on intermediary regulation on one hand and analogically stretched voyeurism, obscenity, and identity theft provisions on the other.<\/p>\n

Comparative Legal Analysis<\/strong><\/p>\n

A comparative survey of jurisdictions that have moved more decisively than India offers useful guidance, both as to what a workable statute might contain and as to the practical difficulties that even well drafted legislation continues to encounter.<\/p>\n

South Korea offers perhaps the most aggressive criminal response anywhere in the world. Article 14 and 14 2 of the Act on Special Cases Concerning the Punishment of Sexual Crimes were amended in September 2024, following widespread public outrage over Telegram based sexual exploitation networks, to raise the maximum sentence for producing or distributing deepfake pornographic material from five to seven years imprisonment, regardless of whether the creator ever intended to distribute the images, and, in an unusually far reaching step, to criminalise the mere possession or viewing of such material, an offence punishable by up to three years imprisonment or a fine of up to thirty million won, subject to a defence for persons who unknowingly came into possession of or viewed the content. South Korean police recorded 812 deepfake sex crime cases in the first nine months of 2024 alone, compared with just 156 in the whole of 2021, with roughly eighty four per cent of the 387 suspects arrested being minors, a statistic that has driven substantial government investment in education programmes alongside enforcement. In April 2025, the government inaugurated a National Centre for Digital Sexual Crime Response, operating around the clock across all seventeen provinces and integrating automated detection and removal systems with victim counselling services.<\/p>\n

The United Kingdom has approached the problem primarily through amendment to its Sexual Offences Act 2003. Section 188 of the Online Safety Act 2023 inserted Sections 66B, 66C, and 66D into the Sexual Offences Act, creating four distinct offences relating to the sharing, or threatening to share, an intimate photograph or film, expressly including content that merely appears to show a person in an intimate state, a formulation deliberately broad enough to capture deepfake and nudified imagery alongside genuine photographs. The base offence under Section 66B(1) requires only that the sharing occurred without the subject’s consent and without any reasonable belief in such consent, and is triable summarily, while the aggravated variants, involving intent to cause alarm, distress, or humiliation, sharing for sexual gratification, or threats to share, carry a maximum sentence of two years imprisonment. Sharing an intimate image, including a deepfake, was subsequently designated a priority offence under the Online Safety Act, obliging regulated platforms to take proactive steps to prevent and remove such material or face enforcement action from the regulator Ofcom, including financial penalties that can reach ten per cent of a platform’s global turnover. The United Kingdom government has separately committed, as a manifesto pledge, to criminalising the creation, and not merely the sharing, of sexually explicit deepfakes, a reform that as of the most recent legislative record remains under active consideration through the Criminal Justice Bill and related instruments.<\/p>\n

The United States presents a more fragmented picture, reflecting its constitutional and federal structure. At the federal level, the TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed into law in May 2025, criminalised the creation of nonconsensual deepfakes and required covered platforms to remove reported content within forty eight hours of notification. Prior to this, federal legislative efforts, including the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act and the DEFIANCE Act of 2024, which created a federal civil cause of action for victims of nonconsensual sexual deepfakes, proceeded on parallel and at times overlapping tracks, reflecting the characteristic American preference for combining narrowly targeted criminal provisions with victim initiated civil remedies. A number of individual states have gone further still, and the proliferation of state level nudify prohibitions, including proposals to fine platforms offering such services substantial sums for every nonconsensual image generated within the state, illustrates both the seriousness with which state legislatures now treat the issue and the practical difficulty of relying on a patchwork of subnational statutes to address a problem that is, by its nature, borderless.<\/p>\n

Several broader lessons emerge from this comparative exercise. First, the most effective statutes define the offence around the appearance of the victim in an intimate state, expressly including content that merely appears to depict such a state, rather than around the mechanics of capturing or transmitting a genuine photograph, thereby avoiding the definitional trap that continues to hamper Section 66E of the Information Technology Act in India. Second, several jurisdictions, most strikingly South Korea, have concluded that criminalising distribution alone is insufficient, and have extended liability upstream to the act of creation itself and, more controversially, downstream to knowing possession or consumption, on the reasoning that demand sustains the market for such content regardless of who ultimately shares it. Third, every jurisdiction surveyed has found it necessary to impose direct, enforceable obligations on platforms and intermediaries, whether through priority offence classification in the United Kingdom, mandatory takedown windows in the United States, or the layered intermediary due diligence regime India itself has now adopted through its February 2026 Rules, since criminal liability against individual offenders, however robust, cannot alone address content that has already achieved viral circulation. Fourth, and finally, no jurisdiction, including those with the most comprehensive statutory frameworks, has yet solved the underlying enforcement problem of offshore hosting, encrypted distribution, and cross border jurisdiction, a limitation that any Indian reform will need to confront candidly rather than assume away.<\/p>\n

Gaps and Challenges in the Indian Framework<\/strong><\/p>\n

Drawing together the analysis above, several distinct gaps in Indian law can be identified with some precision.<\/p>\n

First, there is no offence in Indian criminal law that squarely and unambiguously criminalises the creation of a nudified or sexually explicit synthetic image of an identifiable person without their consent, as distinct from its capturing, publishing, or transmission. Every existing provision presupposes an underlying genuine act, whether an act of voyeuristic observation under Section 77 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, an act of capturing a private image under Section 66E of the Information Technology Act, or an act of identity theft under Section 66C, none of which precisely describes the act of algorithmically manufacturing an image that never corresponded to reality.<\/p>\n

Second, the gendered drafting of Sections 77 and 79 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita leaves male, transgender, and nonbinary victims without a clear statutory remedy under those provisions, notwithstanding that nudification tools are, as a technical matter, entirely indifferent to the gender of their target, and reported cases from other jurisdictions, including the mass generation of sexualised images through the Grok chatbot feature in early 2026, demonstrate that victims of AI generated sexual content span every gender and age group, including, alarmingly, minors.<\/p>\n

Third, the statutory hierarchy between privacy focused provisions such as Section 66E and obscenity focused provisions such as Sections 67 and 67A creates a perverse incentive structure in which prosecutors, seeking the harsher available sentence, gravitate toward obscenity charges that require proof the material is lascivious or appeals to prurient interest, a test historically oriented around public morality rather than individual consent, effectively converting a consent based privacy violation into a debate about the moral character of the image itself, and by extension, uncomfortably, about the victim.<\/p>\n

Fourth, the February 2026 amendment to the Intermediary Guidelines Rules, whatever its considerable merits, is regulatory rather than criminal in character, binds only intermediaries operating within India’s jurisdictional reach, and offers no direct mechanism to punish or deter the individual who creates nudified content in the first instance, particularly where that individual uses offshore hosted software and distributes the resulting material through encrypted or peer to peer channels that fall outside conventional platform obligations altogether. Reporting on the commercial ecosystem behind Indian nudification cases has documented payment networks running through Telegram bots and offshore hosted applications specifically structured to sit beyond the reach of Indian regulatory notice.<\/p>\n

Fifth, enforcement capacity remains a serious constraint independent of the substantive law. Cybercrime investigation in India continues to depend heavily on forensic capability that varies considerably across states, and reported prosecutions, including the case underlying the Babydoll Archi episode, have been delayed for want of completed forensic analysis many months after arrest, undermining both deterrence and the timely relief victims urgently require. A statute, however well drafted, achieves little without matching investment in specialised cybercrime units, forensic laboratories capable of authenticating or debunking synthetic media, and structured training for police officers and magistrates who may otherwise struggle, as one defence lawyer candidly admitted in a recent Indian prosecution, to understand how an image can be generated from a prompt at all.<\/p>\n

Sixth, the absence of a clear civil remedy running alongside any criminal provision leaves victims dependent on the pace, and the sometimes considerable delay, of criminal investigation and trial, whereas jurisdictions such as the United States have found it useful to create a parallel civil cause of action, allowing a victim to seek an injunction and damages without waiting on the outcome, or indeed the initiation, of a criminal prosecution.<\/p>\n

Toward a Specific Criminal Statute: Recommendations<\/strong><\/p>\n

The cumulative weight of the preceding analysis points toward a single central conclusion, namely that India requires a standalone, gender neutral criminal statute, or at minimum a substantially reworked and consolidated set of provisions within the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, that treats nudification and nonconsensual synthetic sexual imagery as a specific offence defined by its own elements, rather than continuing to rely on judicial analogy and intermediary regulation to compensate for a legislative vacuum. Several concrete elements of such a statute merit consideration, drawing on both the comparative material examined above and the specific deficiencies identified in the Indian context.<\/p>\n

The offence should be defined around the creation or sharing of an image or recording that shows, or appears to show, an identifiable person in an intimate or sexually explicit state, expressly including content generated, in whole or in part, through artificial intelligence or any other algorithmic means, and expressly clarifying that no genuine underlying photograph or recording of the victim in such a state need ever have existed. This formulation, borrowed substantially from the appears to show language of Section 66B of the United Kingdom’s Sexual Offences Act, closes the precise definitional gap that continues to limit Section 66E of the Information Technology Act in India.<\/p>\n

The statute should apply equally regardless of the gender of the victim or the offender, correcting the gendered limitation of Sections 77 and 79 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and bringing Indian law into line with the gender neutral drafting that scholars have increasingly urged for these provisions in any event.<\/p>\n

Following the South Korean and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom precedent, the statute should distinguish graduated levels of culpability, namely creation of nonconsensual synthetic intimate imagery as the gravest offence, sharing or threatening to share such imagery as a serious offence, and, more contentiously but consistent with the reasoning that sustained consumer demand fuels the underlying market, knowing possession for the purpose of further circulation as a lesser but still punishable offence, while preserving an explicit defence for persons who unknowingly received or viewed such material.<\/p>\n

Consistent with the reasoning of Subhranshu Rout and the constitutional foundation laid in Puttaswamy, the statute should place the right to be forgotten on an express statutory footing in this specific context, empowering a designated authority, whether a specially constituted tribunal or the existing cybercrime coordination architecture, to issue binding removal and delisting directions enforceable directly against intermediaries, without requiring the victim to approach a High Court under its constitutional writ jurisdiction in every instance.<\/p>\n

The statute should be harmonised expressly with the February 2026 Intermediary Guidelines Rules, so that the criminal offence, the intermediary due diligence obligation, and the takedown timeline operate as a single coherent scheme rather than as parallel regimes developed independently by different arms of government, an alignment that would also usefully resolve the present ambiguity between the intent based definition of deepfake found in the pending private member’s bill and the broader synthetically generated information definition found in the Rules themselves.<\/p>\n

Finally, any new statute must be accompanied by parallel investment in institutional capacity, including dedicated forensic laboratories capable of authenticating synthetic media at scale, structured training for investigating officers and members of the judiciary, and a public education campaign of the kind South Korea has undertaken in schools, particularly given that a meaningful proportion of documented Indian and international cases, including several referenced in this article, have involved minors as either victims or perpetrators. Without such investment, even a carefully drafted statute risks the same fate that has befallen several existing provisions in this area, namely a law that exists on paper but rarely translates into a timely remedy for the ordinary victim who lacks the visibility or resources of a film actor or a public figure.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

The technology underlying AI nudification has advanced far more quickly than the statutory language meant to restrain its misuse, and Indian law, for all the genuine ingenuity its courts have shown, remains built around an older and narrower conception of the wrong, one in which an intimate image must first be genuinely captured before it can be unlawfully shared. That conception no longer describes the world in which a stranger can fabricate a convincing sexual image of any identifiable person from a single social media photograph, at no cost, in a matter of seconds, and circulate it to an audience the victim will often never be able to fully identify or reach. The judicial recognition of a right to be forgotten in Boxi, Subhranshu Rout, and the line of cases that followed, together with the regulatory ambition of the February 2026 Intermediary Guidelines Rules, mark real and creditable progress. Neither, however, substitutes for a criminal statute that names the wrong precisely, applies to every victim regardless of gender, and closes the gap between the manufacture of nonconsensual intimate imagery and the law’s continuing insistence that such imagery must first have been genuinely captured before it can be punished. Until Parliament enacts such a statute, the burden of adapting an analogue era criminal code to a synthetic and rapidly evolving harm will continue to fall, as it has for the better part of a decade, on judges improvising remedies one case at a time, and on victims for whom that improvisation, however well intentioned, too often arrives too late.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Author: Satyansh Sinha, a LLB (H), 5th semester student at Amity University Patna Abstract The rise of artificial intelligence tools capable of generating sexually explicit imagery from an ordinary photograph has transformed the older problem of revenge pornography into a far more scalable and insidious harm. Applications commonly described as nudification or undressing tools allow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5037,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawjurist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawjurist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawjurist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawjurist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawjurist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20909"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/lawjurist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20920,"href":"https:\/\/lawjurist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20909\/revisions\/20920"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawjurist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawjurist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawjurist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawjurist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}