Janhvi Kapoor recently spoke about the darker realities of growing up in the spotlight, recalling a traumatic experience from her teenage years. In a recent conversation, she shared how she first came across a morphed, sexually explicit image of herself while still in school.
On Raj Shamani’s podcast, Janhvi recalled being just 15 years old when the incident occurred. While attending an IT class at school, she realised that male classmates were looking at a pornographic website. To her horror, the site featured a deepfake-style image of her face morphed onto someone else’s body.
“I remember I was in my IT class and I saw boys in my class looking at this site and there was a photo of me on it,” she shared. Janhvi described the experience as isolating, noting that at such a young age, she felt she had to ‘rationalise’ the lack of morality on social media because of her family’s fame.
While the initial incident happened years ago, Janhvi emphasised that the problem has only evolved with the rise of Artificial Intelligence. She expressed deep concern over how AI-generated visuals are now used to create false narratives.
She added, “I am not at peace with it. There are visuals of me out there, even shared by official news pages, which are completely AI. I have never worn those clothes or been photographed like that.”
The actress noted that even reputable news pages occasionally share AI visuals of her in outfits she has never worn. This, she argues, poses a professional threat and said, “It gets circulated as if it’s something I’ve put out. That creates a certain kind of impression. Suppose tomorrow I go to a director and I say, ‘Listen, I am not comfortable wearing this’. They can point to a morphed image and say, ‘But you’ve done it before’.”