Google’s YouTube sued for damages, an AI deepfake channel with 16 million views disappears

Bollywood stars Abhishek Bachchan and his wife, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, have sued YouTube regarding its AI training policy. The couple asked the judge to remove and prohibit the creation of AI videos infringing their intellectual property rights.

The couple want Google to have safeguards to ensure that such YouTube videos uploaded anyway don’t train other AI platforms. 

The couple argues in their filings that if AI platforms are trained on biased content that negatively portrays them and infringes their intellectual property rights, then AI models are likely to learn and disseminate such untrue information.

Hundreds of AI-generated Bollywood videos have been taken down

In response to the lawsuit, the judge ordered the takedown of a handful of YouTube links last month, which the actors sought. 

Now hundreds of AI-generated Bollywood videos with 16 million views have been deleted from Google’s YouTube because they were similar to those at the centre of a legal challenge filed by the celebrity couple to protect their rights.

The most popular video on the now-deleted channel was a video with 4.1 million views showing an AI animation of Salman Khan and Aishwarya in a swimming pool. Khan was in a relationship with Aishwarya long before she got married. 

Among them were a clip showing Abhishek posing but then suddenly kissing a film actress using AI manipulation, and an AI depiction of Aishwarya and Khan enjoying a meal together, while Abhishek Bachchan fumes.

The lawsuits contain hundreds of links and posts specifically listed by the actors to be taken down, stating that they caused harm to the couple and damaged their dignity and goodwill. 

The couple is seeking $450,000 in damages against Google and other little-known websites offering unauthorised merchandise with images of them. Still, some other videos similar to the examples mentioned in Abhishek’s lawsuit papers on YouTube were still online as of Friday.

India is YouTube’s largest market globally, and it is popular for entertainment content, such as Bollywood videos. It has around 600 million users. In May, YouTube disclosed that it had paid more than $2.4 billion to Indian creators over the last three years. Therefore, creators infringing on their personality rights can make money when videos become popular.

Grok and China’s AI found in the mess

The actors argue that YouTube’s content and third-party training policies are concerning, as they allow users to consent to sharing a video they created to train a rival AI model, thereby risking the further proliferation of misleading content online.

The filings read, “Such content being used to train AI models has the potential to multiply the instances of use of any infringing content, i.e. first being uploaded on YouTube, being viewed by the public and then also being used to train.”

YouTube said that the creator deleted the channel mentioned in the news agency’s report. The company said that it only prohibits harmful misinformation and removes content that has been technically manipulated or doctored in a way that misleads users.

YouTube’s data-sharing policy states that creators can opt in to share their videos for training models of other AI platforms, such as OpenAI, Meta, and xAI. YouTube added,  “We can’t control what a third-party company does” if users share videos for such training purposes.

In one of the tutorials, the illegal channel explains that it used simple text prompts to create an image via xAI’s Grok and then turned it into a video using Chinese AI startup Minimax’s Hailuo. This comes after the US reports on AI. The US dubbed China’s AI dangerous because it can be easily manipulated.