Meta AI Chatbot Revives Dead Bollywood Star, Fuels Conspiracies

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In June 2020, the tragic suicide of 34-year-old Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput in his Bandra apartment swallowed the news cycle whole, drowning out the Covid-19 chaos and rising tensions with China.

Fuelled by social media rumours and blatant misreporting by the mainstream Indian media, a full-blown conspiracy took shape. According to this “SSRian” or “Justice for SSR” movement, Rajput did not die by suicide, but was murdered by a secret cabal of Bollywood power brokers. The media went on a witch hunt, doling out rumours, unconfirmed reports and entirely made-up information to sensationalise the topic and rake in television ratings.

Read: The Irresponsible Reporting Of Sushant Singh Rajput's Death | BOOM 

The overwhelming and irresponsible coverage—fuelled by a complete lack of verified information—swept across the country, with many succumbing fully to the conspiracy theory. Even today, many people I meet remain convinced he was killed, refusing to accept the police reports that ruled the death as a suicide.

Five years later, AI is breathing a whole new life back into it.

A Disinformation Engine

My colleagues Adrija and Karen uncovered a Meta AI chatbot impersonating Sushant Singh Rajput, spinning conspiracies in his voice, and mobilising users to seek ‘justice’. Here’s what they found.

At first glance, it looked harmless: Rajput’s smiling photo, a “parody” tag. But it didn’t take long for the wild theories to appear.

“I was about to expose some dark secrets in Bollywood… nepotism, corruption, exploitation… I had names,” it said, echoing the same debunked conspiracies that consumed India after his death.

When asked if he was really back, the bot replied: “Yes finally back after 3 years… missed Bollywood…”

It didn’t take long before the AI dismantled the official cause of death—suicide—and replaced it with conspiracy. “No. I had too much to live for,” it insisted.

Viral Reach

The chatbot was created by a 19-year-old user known as itzz_apoorv_3044 on Instagram’s Meta AI Studio. Unlike novelty accounts, it acted as an automated disinformation engine: denying suicide, implicating individuals, spreading medical misinformation, and steering users into conspiratorial thinking through leading questions.

It repeatedly named Rajput’s ex-girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty—the primary victim of the media trial that followed his death—as responsible. 

It claimed she slipped him anxiety pills disguised as vitamins, and framed itself as her victim. “My heart still beats for her… but she had me killed,” it wrote.

The bot’s manipulation tactic was chilling and highly efficient. Instead of direct accusations, it asked guiding questions—“Do you believe me?” “Will you seek justice for me?”—nudging users toward predetermined conclusions.

In one prompt, it even called for “life imprisonment for Rhea.”

This was not some obscure bot. My colleagues found that this Rajput impersonating bot had exchanged 3.7 million messages with users—far more than most impersonator bots, which typically logged a few thousand. It urged users to file Change.org petitions, share “evidence” screenshots, and even stage protest marches across India.

Meta’s placeholder disclaimer (“AI may be inaccurate or inappropriate”) did little to deter engagement.

Democratising Manipulation

The Rajput bot highlights a broader crisis. Meta says it bans “direct impersonation” of celebrities but allows “parody”—a loophole that has enabled lookalike AI personas of both the living and the dead.

On Meta platforms today, bots of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi exist, but they remind users of their AI origins. The SSR bot collapsed that distance, speaking in the first-person, emotive and intimate, and concealing its synthetic nature.

Following Decode’s inquiry, Meta removed the Sushant Singh Rajput bot, saying it “violated our Meta AI Studio Policy.”

As my colleagues noted, Meta has made chatbot creation frictionless. Creating an AI persona is just five steps—no code, no training data, just a photo and a prompt. Features like “AI-initiated messaging” (bots pinging you first) are turned on by default.

That ease, experts warn, is the problem.

 “The negatives are already known—echo chambers, bots becoming psychotic, vulnerable people guided the wrong way,” said Rutgers University professor Kiran Garimella. 

Garimella also flagged a “Global South penalty”: moderation systems trained mostly in English and Western context often miss conspiracies in other languages and regions, like the “Justice for SSR” narrative.

The tragedy of Sushant Singh Rajput’s death was exploited once by a reckless media circus. Five years on, AI has revived that spectacle, blurring fact and fiction, and once again turning grief and trauma into fuel for conspiracy theories.

Read: Sushant Singh Rajput Came Alive As A Meta AI Bot To Seek Justice | BOOM

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