New Delhi

In a turnaround development, the government is unlikely to make a policy or regulate artificial intelligence (AI) as the new thinking is that there are enough existing legal safeguards to penalise wrongdoers. Instead, the government is likely to come up with a voluntary compliance code for different players, top level government sources said.

“We don’t believe that right now there is a need to actually legislate on AI. There are three elements here which are covered in the existing legal frameworks or frameworks which are under creation. One is data – how personal data is treated (through Digital Personal Data Protection Act). Second is the issue which relates to misrepresentation and deep fakes. Third, is the question of what happens with copyrights,” a senior official at Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) told businessline.

In terms of misrepresentation, it is not the question of regulation because misrepresentation is covered under existing law, the official said adding that the only issue is the speed with which a misrepresentation can be discovered.

“That is more technological issue on how quickly you are able to detect it and how quickly are you able to address the issue moving forward. For copyrights , there is a law and now you also have a case (Open AI vs ANI). So, the copyright part of it has to be administered under the existing law,” said the official. Recently, the Asian News International (ANI) agency of India filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for using ANI news content to training its AI chatbot.

All of these elements in different ways are getting covered, and for the remaining issues, a voluntary compliance code can be evolved which can work to begin with, he said.

Having said that, the official also added that the government at some point in time may legislate on AI.

“We will watch the situation and at an appropriate stage if there is a need , we will legislate, that’s all. So, I think that is the stance. It’s a sovereign function, the government can legislate at any point if there is a need on a case to case basis. We are discussing with stakeholders on this voluntary code and things...some discussions are going on,” he said.

For instance, the government is discussing AI Safety Institutes that it is planning to set up. Discussions are going on about what needs to happen there, he added.

Earlier this year, AI regulation was a much-debated topic, especially after deep fake videos of actors and citizens surfaced and AI systems like Google’s Gemini showed inconsistencies in responses about political figures, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

There were also reports of MeitY drafting a legislation which could be a standalone law requiring social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and X to include watermarks and labels on AI-generated content.

MeitY was also exploring legal frameworks to mandate companies developing large language models to train their systems on Indian local languages and context-specific content.

Related Topics