Babydoll Archie’s Instagram followers grew to 1.4 million in a few days. Every day new fans kept joining to see her bold photos and videos.
One of her videos went viral in India. In it, she was seen wearing a red sari and dancing sensually to a Romanian song “Dame Un Grr”.
In another photo, she was seen posing with American adult film star Kendra Lust.
This video and photo made her famous overnight. Her name started trending on Google search. Memes and fan pages started being created on social media.
There were reports that she was going to join the US porn industry, which would have been the first case of someone from Assam joining it.
Mainstream media also covered this frenzy. Babydoll Archie was described as “an influencer” and many people tried to write profiles on her.
Deepfake image of real woman created for revenge
The search term “Who is Babydoll Archie?” made headlines.
But there was no real woman behind this viral sensation.
It was a fake Instagram account but the face used in it was very similar to a real woman. She was a housewife from Dibrugarh city of Assam.
We will call her Sanchi.
The case came to light when Sanchi’s brother filed a police complaint.
Sanchi’s ex-boyfriend Pratim Bora was arrested.
Senior police officer Sijal Agarwal, who is leading the investigation, told that Sanchi and Bora had a fight. After this, Bora created a face similar to her with AI to take “complete revenge”.
According to Sijal Agarwal, a mechanical engineer, Bora learned artificial intelligence himself. and created a fake profile using Sanchi’s personal photos.
Bora is currently in police custody and has not yet given any statement.
The BBC has contacted her family. If their statement comes, it will be updated in this report.
The Babydoll Archie account was created in 2020 and the first post was posted in May 2021.
Sizzle Agarwal said that the initial pictures were real pictures of Sanchi which were morphed.
She said, “With the passage of time, Bora created an AI version using tools like Chat GPT and Design. Then he put deepfake photos and videos on that Instagram handle.”
Sizzle Agarwal said that this account started getting likes from last year but it started becoming popular rapidly from April this year.
On the night of July 11, Sanchi’s family gave a written complaint in two short paragraphs to the police. Along with this, printouts of some photos and videos were given as evidence.
Sizzle Agarwal says The complaint did not name anyone as the family had no idea who could be behind it.
Babydoll Archie was not an unknown name to the police.
According to Agrawal, the police had also seen media reports and comments which speculated that it was an AI-created personality. But it was never said that it was based on a real person.
As soon as the police received the complaint, they wrote a letter to Instagram seeking information about the account creator.
Sizal Agrawal said, “As soon as we got the information from Instagram, we asked Sanchi if she knew Pratim Bora. When she said yes, we tracked him down in the neighbouring district of Tinsukia and arrested him on the evening of July 12.”
She said the police “seized his laptop, mobile phone, hard drive and bank documents as he had made money from that account.”
Sijal Agarwal said, “That account had three thousand subscriptions on Linktree and we think he earned around ten lakh rupees from it. He earned three lakh rupees in just five days before his arrest.”
Sijal Agarwal said that Sanchi is very broken. But now she and her family are being given counseling and they are slowly recovering.
She said, “It is almost impossible to completely stop such incidents. But if we had taken action earlier, this Instagram handle could have been prevented from gaining more popularity.”
Sijal Agarwal said, “Sanchi had no idea about this because she is not on social media. Her family was also completely blocked from this account. They came to know about it only when this account went viral.”
Meta has not answered BBC’s questions in this matter. But in general it does not allow posts containing nudity or sexual content.
Last month, CBS reported that Meta had removed several ads promoting AI tools that were being used to create sexually suggestive deepfakes from images of real people.
Why is it so difficult to prevent such incidents?
Babydoll Archie’s Instagram account had 282 posts. It is no longer publicly available.
However, social media is still full of her photos and videos, and there is one Instagram account that has all this content. The BBC has asked Meta what action it plans to take on this.
AI expert and lawyer Meghna Bal says that what happened to Sanchi is “horrific, but it is almost impossible to stop it.”
She said that Sanchi can go to court and ask for the ‘right to be forgotten’. The court can order that the press reports in which her name has been mentioned be removed. But it is very difficult to erase every trace from the Internet.
Meghna Bal says that what happened to Sanchi is the same thing that has always happened to women. Often their photos and videos are circulated with a feeling of revenge.
She says, “Now it has become even easier because of AI. However, such incidents are still not as common as we think. Or these are less reported because there is a fear of defamation. Or the person who has been targeted does not come to know about it himself, as happened in this case.”
She said, ”The people who were watching all this were not going to get any benefit by reporting it on social media platforms or cyber crime portals. That is also why such things are not reported.”
The sections used by the police in the complaint filed against Bora are related to sexual harassment, dissemination of obscene material, defamation, tarnishing the image by making false documents, fraud by hiding identity and cyber crime.
If Bora is found guilty, he can be sentenced to a maximum of 10 years.
In recent times, there has been a lot of outrage on social media regarding this matter and some people have demanded strict laws to deal with such cases.
Meghna Bal believes that the existing laws are sufficient to deal with such cases. But whether new laws are needed for cases related to generative AI companies will have to be considered.
However, she says, “But we also have to remember that deepfakes are not necessarily always wrong. We have to be very cautious while making laws because they can be used to suppress people’s freedom of expression.”
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