In contrast to the view taken by the European Union and the US government, the Indian government is not in favour of legislation to regulate generative AI yet, according to Chandrasekhar, minister of state for electronics and IT. He added that discipline needs to be brought into the industry that can cause much chaos and harm.
“If anybody says I know the right way to regulate AI, there will be an Elon Musk view, the Open AI view, or 100 other views. We are not going to go down that road at all,” he told ET in an interview.
“AI is an emerging technology, and we will establish some principles as guardrails. Then the subordinate legislation or how to regulate it will keep evolving,” he said.
India has one of the largest data sets and is therefore very crucial for companies working on generative AI. It is importantIndia does not allow technology regulation to lag technology innovation in AI, the minister said. “AI innovation is now growing very fast. In a blink of an eye, there’s a new disruption. So, therefore, we must establish fairly embedded principles in the law.”
Pointing out that the proposed guardrails will put the onus on the platforms to ensure that no one is using them to “create misinformation, you cannot create things that are fake, you cannot cause user harm, you cannot have exploitive content,” Chandrasekhar said that the government will define terms such as “exploitative” through consultation with the industry.
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The upcoming Digital India Act (DIA), which is a revamp of the 23-year-old IT Act, will also contain a chapter on emerging technologies.The Centre, which has held one round of consultations on the DIA, is planning to hold another one later in May in New Delhi. The new law will not just update several regulations with respect to technology but also frame new ones to regulate emerging areas such as Web 3 among others.
It is also reviewing the concept of safe harbor or immunity which is enjoyed by Internet intermediaries under Section 79 of the IT Act. Chandrasekhar told ET that in the new DIA, as a principle, India is moving away from “the idea of no accountability” of the platform.
“You cannot say anymore that I am just a platform and I just put all the functionality. The platform is responsible, not the user. That is a principal change. Section 79 will be very conditional, very narrow, any safe harbor, any immunity will be extremely narrow. Your responsibility is that you are accountable for the possibility or misuse of your platform, you are responsible not the user,” he added.
In the case of generative AI models, Chandrasekhar said that companies where their LLM (Large Language Models) are still learning and are in the alpha stage, they should not release it. “Don’t give it to all the consumers and run a business on it. Do a sandbox rather than saying it’s an alpha or a beta version. Like you do drug testing? We must bring discipline and order into an industry that can cause so much chaos and harm,” he added.
Generative AI uses large data sets to train tools and engines to generate new and unseen data such as text, images, audio, videos, and other three-dimensional models.
Since the release of the OpenAI’s language learning model ChatGPT model 3 in November last year, big tech companies including Google and Microsoft have raced to it in their services.
The language learning models have, however, been criticised for being inaccurate, having very lax guidelines for privacy and safety of users, and concerns over the training models used by companies. They are also being used to fuel a lot of misinformation.
Earlier this month, the US administration started the process to seek public comments on the accountability standards that should be introduced for AI systems such as ChatGPT.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration sought public comments on the subject owing to growing regulatory interest in AI engines. Similarly, the EU has started working on the consultation process to bring regulations for efficient management of AI and generative AI engines.
Speaking about the government’s $10 billion Indian semiconductor Mission, Chandrasekhar said that “We have said in the past that there will soon be approvals for a 40-nm fab soon and that there will be one for a packaging unit as well.” He also said that the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill is likely to be tabled in the Monsoon session of the Parliament.
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