“I found ten to fifteen accounts. There are hundreds of such accounts posting nude images of women and young girls — AI-generated,” said a sixteen-year-old content creator from Belgaum, a small town in Karnataka, as quoted in DecodeInternet.in’s investigative report on India’s AI deepfake supply chain and its operations.
Instagram says non-consensual AI deepfakes didn’t violate their community guidelines: She was targeted by an anonymous troll network that generated nude images in bulk using AI deepfake tools, embedded them as brief flashes into her own Instagram reels using a moving logo as cover, and tagged her so the content reached her own followers. When she first reported the content to Meta, Instagram said the content did not violate its community standards.
Read the full story on DecodeInternet.in: A three-month longform investigation by Decode and Tattle, supported by the Pulitzer Center, “Desi Faces, Foreign Servers: Inside the AI Economy Undressing Women,” traces the commercial supply chain behind AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) in India, from open-source Chinese AI models and American distribution platforms to Telegram bots accepting UPI payments and a Sequoia-backed Bengaluru startup.
The story primarily explores how the identity of a real woman from Assam was exploited by her ex-partner, who created a fake Instagram account featuring AI-generated content using her identity. This story exposes how law enforcement, content moderation, and platform regulation are all failing as cheaper AI deepfake tools enable the exploitation of women’s privacy and dignity at scale without consent or knowledge.
You can read the full story here: [ Original | Archived ]
What DecodeInternet’s investigation found:
- RTI reveals that the government has no data on complaints against AI deepfakes: When Decode sent questions to I4C, NCRB, and MeitY through RTI, they reportedly stated that they have no information available on deepfake-related complaints. The report further stated that I4C said that complaints are automatically routed to the state police and that the centre holds no operational records.
- Indian startup took 30% from revenue share for AI deepfakes: A Bengaluru startup, Renown, which operates ActualFans, reportedly took a 30% cut from subscriptions on an AI deepfake personality with no identity verification in place (unlike OnlyFans).
- AI deepfake Telegram bots powered with UPI: Decode explains how cybercriminals used Telegram bots as one of the easiest and most accessible entry points into the non-consensual AI deepfake online market. Users just have to upload a photograph to generate explicit video content. The bots offer menus of positions, scenarios, video lengths, and sexual specifications. These Telegram bots accepted payments via apps like Apple Pay, Google Pay, UPI, Paytm and PhonePe and delivered output in approximately 60 seconds. Credits are sold in bulk packages ranging from Rs 1,019 to Rs 71,900.
- AI deepfake app with CSAM is still available on app stores: a1.art, run by Hong Kong-based Jishi Design on Chinese servers, with over one crore Google Play downloads, was found to contain child sexual abuse material; Google did not respond to questions. The app is still available on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.
- Chinese open-source models dominate AI-generated sexual deepfake video generation: All video generation models analysed by Decode were built on Alibaba’s open-source Wan series, fine-tuned for sexually explicit content, and distributed through American platforms, such as CivitAI and Hugging Face, a publicly downloadable repository of AI models.
- Cloudflare as dominant CDN: 27 of the 31 AI nudification websites investigated by Decode used Cloudflare as their content delivery network (CDN).
Chapter-1 — The Character: An excerpt from “Desi Faces, Foreign Servers: Inside the AI Economy Undressing Women”
She was everything an algorithm rewards. Bold. Consistent. Profitable.
On Instagram, ‘Babydoll Archi’ was an unapologetic survivor — a woman who had spent six years as a sex worker on Delhi’s GB Road, paid ₹25 lakh to buy her freedom, and was now living, defiantly and publicly, on her own terms.
Her tops were revealing, her poses confident.
She geotagged herself across Indian cities. She posted charity donation receipts. The post where she appeared alongside American adult film actress Kendra Lust went viral. The follower count went from 82,000 to 1.4 million in days.
An entertainment outlet ran a 1,200-word profile of her journey to the international stage that read like a publicist’s brief. National media published her biography and estimated her net worth at ₹20–40 lakh, earned from “sponsored posts, affiliate deals, and modelling.”
On Telegram, subscribers could access explicit content. Links directed them to “full nude videos.” S
He was the perfect internet lore.
She was not real.
The viral sensation was a homemaker in a small town in Assam, completely unaware that her ex-boyfriend from college had been using Artificial Intelligence to place her face onto bodies that didn’t belong to her.
Pratim Bora, a 30-year-old mechanical engineer, had built a business around the character he had made of her, dressing and undressing her to the whims of paying subscribers.
When the police arrested him in July 2025, five years had passed. The same media that had amplified the fake persona without any verification now amplified his arrest with equal enthusiasm. The real woman, whose name had by then been indexed on pornographic websites, retreated from public life. Bora was cast as the mastermind. The story closed neatly around him. But the economy that made “Babydoll Archi” possible did not.
This is a story about how that economy works.
Decode and Tattle spent three months mapping the supply chain of AI-powered undressing tools — applications, bots, payment networks and the platforms that host them — that make the non-consensual undressing of women a commercial activity.
Startups backed by venture capital make money from the use of AI on non-consensual images of women. Telegram bots recruit Indian payment agents on commission. AI models built to generate sexual content of South Asian women run on Chinese software, distributed through American platforms. At every link in the chain, money changes hands.
At the centre of each transaction is usually a woman who has no idea that her face is being used to run it.
On a swampy night in July last year, Lila Kanta Bora watched, with disbelief, as the police packed his youngest son, Pratim, into a car and drove away.
Lila is seventy years old and retired from the Public Health Engineering Department of Assam. In the years since leaving government service, he has built an ordinary but orderly life — selling packaged milk and his wife’s homemade pickles in their small grocery store, judging Bihu competitions every spring, spending his weekends at the naamghar (community worship hall) of his town.
He is the social one in the family; neighbours will tell you. Pratim was always the quiet one. The studious one. The engineer.
Pratim’s father runs a small grocery store in Tinsukia, a bustling commercial town in Assam | Illustration: Arjun Chopra (edited with AI and Adobe tools)
The neighbours saw the police arrive at their rented two-storey home, tucked away in a leafy lane of Tinsukia, a small and bustling commercial town in Assam. They don’t ask questions, Lila said — but they look at the family differently.
They know what his son did. There are whispers: “He morphed a girl’s photos”… “She was in a relationship with him.”
Lila can’t make sense of it. “He was a smart boy,” he said. “Good in his studies.”
He paused.
“He has been framed.”
Since the arrest, Pratim’s bank accounts have been frozen, and the financial burden has fallen on his father.
“He was always interested in drawing and designing,” he said. After Pratim moved back to Assam during the pandemic, his father recalled, he would spend hours working from home on his computer.
“That is all we knew; we never interfered, and we did not understand much more. How would we?” What Pratim was working on, for over five years, was the fabrication of a woman.
It has been nearly a year since the arrest. The case has not moved. The charge sheet was still unprepared, the forensic analysis was still pending, and Pratim was granted bail because the police ran out of the mandated time.
“Mur du-thengiya jontu’r uporot biswash herai gol (I have lost faith in mankind),” Lila said, in Assamese.
Go Deep:
Important reading on MrDeepFakes: You can also read 2025’s collaborative investigation report by Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based online publication that specializes in open-source intelligence (OSINT) journalism. They tracked down David Do, the individual behind MrDeepFakes.com, which hosted a lot of deepfake pornography of various celebrities. Explore more here: [ Read article | YouTube ]
Rati Foundation’s research report: Make It Real: Mapping AI-Facilitated Gendered Harm — [ PDF ]
Sensity reports on deepfakes: Find all the original reports on Sensity’s website [ URL ]
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