MORPHED AND AI-GENERATED INTIMATE IMAGES: CONSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES TO BODILY DIGNITY UNDER THE INDIAN CRIMINAL FRAMEWORK

Abstract

The spread of morphed images and AI-generated deep fake intimate images has created a new breed of gendered harm that the Indian criminal order, based on a physical world of bodily capture and material obscenity, has become structurally ill-designed to cope with. The paper claims that non-consensual synthetic intimate imagery (NCSII) harms a constitutional interest Indian jurisprudence has identified with only relative specificity only recently: that of bodily dignity, understood as the confluence of bodily integrity, informational privacy, and decisional autonomy recognised in the case of K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, which is a nine-judge bench. It contends that inherited scaffolding, obscenity-centred provisions mentioned in the Information Technology Act, 2000 , the “modesty”-centred sexu”al offences carried forward almost verbatim into the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, “and the notice-and-takedown architecture of intermediary regulation—misdescribes the wrong, conditions protection on a colonial vocabulary of female honour, and founders on the doctrinal puzzle that a synthetic image depicts no real body. The paper evaluates the constitutional tension between dignity and expression under Articles 19(1)(a) and 19(2), applies the four-pronged standard of proportionality, and examines the 2025 draft synthetic-information rules according to the doctrines of void-for-vagueness and overbreadth. Putting India into a comparatively fast-convergent comparative domain with that of the AI Act of the European Union, the Online Safety Act in the United Kingdom, the TAKE IT DOWN Act in the United States, the French and South Korean models of penal law suggests a dignity-based, consent-based, and gender-inclusive statutory crime supported by a platform-accountable regime. The argument’s normative core is that the constitutional lodestar must migrate from the protection of modesty to the protection of dignity.