Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Monday clarified the government’s recent advisory mandating government approval for under trial or training platforms before launching Artificial Intelligence (AI) products amid concerns and blowback over the move. The minister said that the advisory was aimed only at “significant and large platforms” and wouldn’t apply to startups.
“Advisory is aimed at untested AI platforms from deploying on Indian Internet,” Chandrashekhar, the Minister for Electronics and IT, tweeted. The post followed the government’s tough March 1 advisory for social media and other platforms, triggered days after Google’s AI platform Gemini provided an objectionable response to a question about Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“Process of seeking permission, labelling and consent based disclosure to user about untested platforms is insurance policy to platforms who can otherwise be sued by consumers,” Chandrasekhar tweeted on Monday.
The Union IT Minister said that the safety and trust of “India’s internet” is a shared and common goal for the central government, users and platforms.
The government issued the recent advisory on March 1, over two months after the ministry issued the first advisory in December last year under the new IT rules. The first one was aimed at social media platforms directing them to follow existing IT rules to tackle deepfake problems.
“We issued one more advisory, which is a continued one that advises intermediaries and platforms that use AI, to be very careful about deploying on the public internet in India and allowing access to consumers,” the Union Minister told ANI.
Rajeev Chandrasekhar said the second advisory was issued to ensure another case of Google Gemini AI tool that clearly showed a “violation in law by outputting unlawful content” was not repeated.
He further said that the advisory would help platforms to be more “disciplined about taking ther AI models and platforms from the lab directly to the market”.
The central government has asked all concerned platforms to share a status report and specify action taken within 15 days of the advisory.
Recently, the Centre cracked down on Google Gemini AI tool for allegedly generating biased answers to a question about Prime Minister Narendra Modi. On February 23, in response to a tweet sharing the alleged biased answers, Rajeev Chandrasekhar blasted the AI model, saying the answers are “direct violations” of the IT rules and several provisions of the Criminal code.