A growing body of research and frontline testimony is documenting a disturbing trend in India: the use of artificial intelligence tools to generate sexualised imagery and fabricated videos targeting Muslim women, in what analysts describe as a form of digitally enabled communal harassment.
Samreen Ayoub, a 24-year-old freelance model from India-administered Kashmir, discovered the pattern firsthand when a friend sent her a video circulating on Instagram. The clip appeared to narrate her life story, complete with a voiceover, scrolling captions and the visual format of a television news segment — but was entirely fabricated. It stitched together photographs from her student days at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi and used an AI-generated voice to falsely claim she was a Muslim woman "selling her body" to Hindu men. Her brother was labelled her "pimp". "It looked so real that if someone, even my parents, saw the video, they would think it was real," she said. Within hours, the video had spread across dozens of accounts, accompanied by abusive comments and threatening phone calls. "It felt like a digital lynching," she said.
A study by the Washington, DC-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH) analysed 1,326 publicly available AI-generated images and videos from 297 public accounts on X, Facebook and Instagram between May 2023 and May 2025. It found that sexualised depictions of Muslim women generated more than 6.7 million interactions across the platforms. Researchers identified a recurring visual pattern: a "Muslim-coded woman" paired with a "Hindu-coded man", with Muslim men depicted as violent or corrupt and Muslim women portrayed as submissive or "rescued" by men from the majority Hindu community. "Generative AI has made the transformation of sexual fantasy into imagery possible at speed and at no cost," said Zenith Khan, a co-author of the study. Meri Trustline, an online safety helpline run by the Mumbai-based RATI Foundation, has handled more than 482 cases since 2022, with roughly ten percent involving digitally manipulated material — a proportion that has been rising as AI tools become more accessible.
Scholars argue this is not random misogyny but a politicised phenomenon with ideological roots. Media anthropologist Sahana Udupa of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich describes it as part of a broader "pornification of politics", in which right-wing digital cultures combine memes, humour and sexualised imagery to normalise abuse against women and minorities. The current wave echoes earlier episodes: the "Sulli Deals" and "Bulli Bai" controversies of 2021 and 2022, in which Muslim women were listed on mock-auction platforms using doctored photographs. Two men were arrested in connection with those cases in January 2022 but were granted bail on humanitarian grounds two months later. Researchers say generative AI has since dramatically expanded the scale and speed of such harassment.
Why this matters: as India participates in global discussions on AI governance — including a high-level AI Impact Summit held in New Delhi earlier this year — the targeting of Muslim women online illustrates how the same technologies being debated in policy forums are already being deployed as instruments of communal intimidation. Atif Rasheed, a politician from the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), acknowledged that AI "can be used both positively and negatively" and called for stronger regulations, describing deepfake and sexually explicit content as "very disappointing". He rejected framing the issue in religious terms, saying the BJP "respects women of all religions". Frontline counsellors and researchers, however, warn that shame and fear keep most cases hidden. "These violations are muted by shame, fear and trauma," said Salman Mujawar of Meri Trustline. "Incidents are rarely revealed even to close family members."