Bollywood wants to offend nobody. AI is happy to help

Rachel Varghese (0:01)

In the 2006 campy action thriller movie, Snakes on a Plane, Samuel L. Jackson has a line that was famous even before the movie came out. His character says that he has had it with the snakes on the plane. And of course, being Samuel L. Jackson, he uses a swear word to say so, which is why I can't say it here. And similar to how I can't repeat Jackson's vocabulary, the word was a problem for the movie when it eventually aired on TV. So the TV edit has the line replaced. And Jackson says that he has had it with the monkey fighting snakes on this Monday to Friday plane.

This version actually became popular in its own right, because it's so ridiculous. It's just not what Jackson would have said. The words don't quite match the way his mouth moves and feels misplaced in the movie.

Now, what if I told you that if the film was released in 2026, there may have been an easy way to make that dialogue change. And it's likely that you would have never noticed. Turns out, in India, filmmakers and shows on streaming are already changing words and lines with this method. Sometimes, they're even doing this at the very last minute, because they're scared of censorship. And not necessarily just from the CBFC or the Central Board of Film Certification. A startup in Bangalore has built an AI tool for exactly these changes. And it's already been used on some releases you may recognize. So how does it work? And what makes Bollywood reach for it? To find out, I'm going to be reading my colleague Shiveka Bakshi's edition from The Ken's subscriber-only newsletter called Trade Tricks. The piece is titled, Bollywood Wants to Offend Nobody, AI is Happy to Help.

Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken. I'm your host, Rachel Varghese, and every day of the week, my co-host, Snigdha Sharma and I will bring you one news story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Monday, the 12th of October.

In Plato's Republic, the ancient Greek philosopher banished the artist from his ideal nation in 375 BC. More than 2000 years later, the artist remains no less under scrutiny. Last week, the Central Board of Film Certification, or the CBFC, released a new set of rules under the Cinematograph Act, making guidelines even stricter for films. But amidst the hubbub of perfecting the film, even OTT platforms, which do not formally fall under the ambit of the CBFC, put themselves through rigorous self-censorship, governed only by the open-ended, vaguely-worded 2021 IT rules. Take for example, the scramble in GeoHotstar's Special Ops 2, released in 2025, to make last-minute changes to a specific dialogue.

Pacing across a busy computer lab, the main antagonist, Sudhir Awasthi, played by Tahir Rajbhasan, calls India the largest user of OBI. He means to allude to a widely popular broad-based digital payment system in the context of an impending cyberattack. The original hook of the scene, however, was a far more obvious, familiar choice, UPI. Shubhavrata Devnath, co-founder and chief technology officer at Bangalore-based startup Neuralgarage, explained that the producers wanted to avoid the suggestion that the UPI infrastructure could be hacked. A few years ago, in the face of a similar problem, the show's editors would have had three choices before them. All carrying the risk of distancing the viewer from the story at hand. Replacing the dubbed audio while retaining the original footage, doing away with the scene altogether, or adding a disclaimer. In this instance, Neuralgarage insists that it has designed a far less choppy solution. Using AI to match the actor's jaw muscles and lips with newly dubbed audio. Debna told me that attention is scarce, and we are not a captive audience anymore. The producer wants to avoid any distraction. The company had used its own generative AI process called visualdub.ai for this special ops 2 scene. Now, the CBFC's inner workings have long been shrouded in opacity. The Indian Express reported early last month that the CBFC does not follow its own set of rules, having retained the same 12 members since 2017, and having reconvened after nearly seven years in 2026 Board members, by the way, are supposed to serve three-year terms.

Data visualization platform Diagram Chasing's Archive, CBFC Watch, makes it clear that the board has silently put strict guardrails around ordinary citizens' access to information about the number and types of changes it orders in each theatrically released film. Yet, even the phantom of the board, which takes the form of a looming fear of violence or legal action, is enough to force filmmakers to scramble to rework scenes at the last second, including those who create content for the digital platforms beyond the CBFC's ambit.