Is Your Internal Committee AI Ready?
A photograph picked up from a colleague’s social media profile can now be altered into a convincing intimate image in minutes. A voice note can be cloned from a thirty-second clip. A face can be placed into a video the person was never in.
When this is done to a female colleague and circulated in a team group, an official WhatsApp group, a project channel or a client mail thread, it is not a technology glitch that the organization needs to fix, but rather a complaint of sexual harassment that it needs to address.
Section 2(n) of the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 defines sexual harassment to include showing pornography and any other unwelcome physical, verbal or non-verbal conduct of a sexual nature. A morphed or artificially generated explicit image of a female colleague, circulated without her consent, falls within that second limb. The Act mentions ‘what’ constitutes sexual harassment but does not anywhere mention anything about any one particular acceptable medium used for creating and transmitting the same. Thus, the content does not gain immunity because it was seemingly produced by a machine. In simple words, the ‘machine’ is merely the ‘instrument’. It is the ‘Brain’ feeding the ‘prompt’ that the Act seeks to punish. ‘Authenticity’ is a question for police and forensic labs to investigate. The IC’s mandate is narrower. Did unwelcome and sexually coloured conduct occur and did it create a hostile work environment? Once the IC internalises this distinction, the question of ‘who is the Brain’ becomes more easier to answer.
In the present era where AI is shaping how modern workspaces function, the courts have time and again held that the definition of “workplace” is elastic enough to extend beyond “physical office” and includes virtual environments like audio – video – text messaging and conferencing environments. So, when the workplace has gone virtual, how can ‘workplace harm’ be confined to the four walls of a traditional workplace? This wider concept of virtual workplace harm must thus be accompanied by strong technology to evaluate evidence. The process of evaluation is further bifurcated into three distinct layers. First – Content Evidence (the unwelcome conduct which falls under section 2(n) of the POSH Act; the file itself); Attribution Evidence (the person who owned it, created or forwarded it; can be determined through device logs, account activity or admissions; Impact Evidence (the complainant’s testimony, witness accounts and downstream workplace consequence.
Time is of essence
The evaluation of evidence becomes even more urgent because digital harm multiplies faster than the pace at which a conventional inquiry proceeds. This is where legislation steps in to speed up the process. Rule 3(2)(b) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2026 requires an intermediary to remove content depicting nudity, a sexual act, impersonation or artificially morphed images within two hours of a grievance. An IC that asks for a detailed investigation before suggesting isolation of material is essentially giving away the protection that the amended IT Rules now afford. So, the question now remains – what exactly needs to be done in the first hou
The Clock has begun ticking.
- Do not forward. This is the Golden Rule. Retain the original file, the message, the sender details and the timestamps. Forwarding re-compresses the file and destroys the metadata on which any later inquiry or prosecution would depend. Do not circulate it even to warn others, and do not discuss it in any group. Section 16 of the POSH Act prohibits publication of the contents of a complaint, the identity of the parties and the proceedings, and Section 17 attaches consequences to breach.
- Report through two channels at once. Report the incident to the Internal Committee of your organization, and separately ask the platform to take the content down. Complaints must be made to the platform’s Grievance Officer, whose details every intermediary must publish.
- Adhere to the limitation period. A complaint to the Internal Committee under Section 9 must be made within three months of the incident, extendable by a further three months for reasons recorded in writing. Where the material is circulated repeatedly, each instance may be treated as a fresh incident.
Conclusion
Once the IC follows the initial steps and gets the timelines straight, then what? what should the IC look for? What are the factors to be considered? What is the right way to handle digital evidence? Should the IC seek assistance of external experts in decoding the evidence? The answer to all these questions along with the complete picture awaits you in part 2 of the Blog.