Shah Rukh Khan

Shah Rukh Khan (born 1965) is an Indian actor and film producer known as the “King of Bollywood,” with a career spanning nearly 100 films — from Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge to Jawan — and a global fandom measured in the hundreds of millions. He is routinely ranked among the most famous people on Earth.

Not just a Cadbury ad

For Diwali 2021, Khan lent his likeness to Mondelez’s “Not Just a Cadbury Ad,” built by Ogilvy India with the AI startup Rephrase.ai. Machine learning recreated his face and voice so that any local shopkeeper could generate — for free — a version of the ad in which the biggest star in India personally named their store. The campaign reached 2,500-plus businesses across more than 500 pin codes, with Khan’s synthetic lip movements synced to each unique shop name, and was later named the world’s most effective campaign in WARC’s rankings, driving a reported 35 percent sales lift.

The campaign was an early, high-profile template for consensual synthetic media: a celebrity explicitly licensing an AI double for a defined purpose, at a scale no shoot could achieve. It also drew scrutiny — commentators noted it normalized deepfake-style production and blurred lines the public barely understood, and by 2024 fact-checkers were debunking unauthorized AI videos of Khan hawking investment scams, the dark mirror of what he had done by choice.

Khan has said little in his own voice about AI specifically; his stance is written in his actions — he was among the first global stars to treat his AI likeness as a licensable asset, years before Hollywood negotiated digital-replica clauses. Asked at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival how digital technology had changed filmmaking, he called it enormously useful as an assist — “what you can imagine, you can show” — while insisting it stays subordinate to story.