The Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) issued a second advisory under the new IT guidelines, which require platforms under trial or training to get clearance from the Centre before deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) products.
The advice was published on Friday evening, more than two months after the Ministry issued an advisory to social media platforms in December last year, instructing them to follow current IT guidelines to address the issue of deepfakes.
Speaking to a news outlet, Union Minister of State for IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar stated, “We issued the first advisory in December to deal with deepfakes and misinformation. Deepfakes are essentially misinformation powered by AI and yesterday (March 1) evening, 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.”
Recommendations made for platforms to be disciplined
“So, we recommend that any such platform include a label indicating that it is being tested. Most essential, it must notify the consumer via a consent method that it may provide inaccurate and untrustworthy information,” he noted.
Chandrasekhar stated that “the second advise was given to prevent a situation we have seen with platforms like Google Gemini (AI model), where they were clearly in violation of the law by outputting unlawful content, from occurring again.”
He also stated that this will assist “platforms to be a lot more disciplined about taking their AI models and platforms from the lab directly to the market”.
“And we do not want that to happen without sufficient guardrails, information and disclaimers in place, so that consumers know what is unreliable before they start using it,”
Building of an AI regulatory framework
Last month, Chandrasekhar stated that the federal government is building an AI regulatory framework that will be released in June or July 2024. The concept aims to use AI for economic growth while mitigating possible risks and drawbacks.
Plans to introduce the framework have long been delayed. In May 2023, the IT Minister announced intentions to release the first draft of the framework.
