Flood of AI and deepfake images underline threat to women, sexual minorities in South Asia

There was the Bollywood star in skin-tight lycra, the Bangladeshi politician filmed in a bikini and the young Pakistani woman snapped with a man.

None was real, but all three images were credible enough to unleash lust, vitriol – and even allegedly a murder, underlining the sophistication of generative artificial intelligence, and the threats it poses to women across Asia.

The two videos and the photo were deepfake, and went viral in a vibrant social mediascape that is struggling to come to grips with the technology that has the power to create convincing copies that can upend real lives.

“We need to address this as a community and with urgency before more of us are affected by such identity theft,” Indian actor Rashmika Mandanna said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that has garnered more than 6.2 million views.

She is not the only Bollywood star to be cloned and attacked on social media, with top actors including Katrina Kaif, Alia Bhatt and Deepika Padukone also targeted with deepfakes.

The lycra video, said Mandanna, was “extremely scary not only for me, but also for each one of us who today is vulnerable to so much harm because of how technology is being misused.”

While digitally manipulated images and videos of women were once easy to spot,...

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