The Centre will release a consultation paper on artificial intelligence (AI) in a month, with an aim to regulate the technology, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said Thursday. This comes amid growing anxieties over security-related risks posed by AI systems, and increasingly deceptive altered media generated through the technology compounding the issue further.
The consultation will primarily focus on AI safety, Vaishnaw said, adding, “Humanity has to be the most important part of this aspect.” The process will also focus on skilling and ensuring that AI-led changes remain inclusive, with no section of society being left behind, he added. “The time has come for AI regulation,” Vaishnaw said.
At the heart of the consultation would be risks posed by deepfakes and other potential harms from AI. The IT Minister said that the quality of deepfakes was improving every day, leading to people being misled about issues that may not be true. Another focus would be on the potential psychological impact of AI, Vaishnaw said, noting that there have been instances across the world where AI played a role in psychological impact on users.
“The bulk of the responsibility has to be on industry,” he said, signalling that technology companies and other industry stakeholders will have a significant role to play in addressing the risks associated with AI.
While the government is now working on an AI law, it had previously said that the country does not need one, and its existing laws were enough to deal with challenges posed by the proliferation of AI platforms.
The government has been enacting piecemeal legislation to bring AI under control. For example, in April, it proposed that social media companies like YouTube, Instagram and X will have to “continuously” display labels on content generated through AI.
However, a broad rethink from targeted lawmaking to an expansive regulatory framework comes amid growing instances of objectionable, high-quality deepfakes, and the government’s anxieties over agentic AI, along with cybersecurity risks posed by such platforms.
In July, The Indian Express had reported that the IT Ministry was exploring a consent-based framework for synthetically-generated content, along with curbs on agentic AI autonomy, and regulatory sandboxes for high-risk applications as it weighs a separate law to regulate AI.
A key focus area of the law is expected to be agentic AI, with the government expected to consider how much autonomy such agents should have, and whether they should be permitted to retain and reuse data.
Agentic AI refers to autonomous AI systems that go beyond simply generating text. Given a high-level goal, they independently plan multi-step actions, utilise external tools, and adjust their strategy in real time to achieve the desired outcome with minimal human supervision.
Another major issue under discussion is the liability of AI platforms and their developers for the content generated by these models.
In the consumer internet world, social media platforms have something called safe harbour, which is legal immunity from hosting user-generated content. This is based on the idea that platforms can not preempt what a user is going to post, and therefore should not be held liable for any problematic speech they may have made.
In the AI world, however, that same logic is difficult to translate directly. AI models are trained on content present on the internet, and inevitably use that information to build their responses.
However, while pattern matching for keywords, these models also editorialise their responses in a way where it may be hard to track its exact statements back to a particular source.
