Indian IT Ministry Removes the Approval of Tech Forms to Launch their AI Products

Recently, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has revised its previous advisory which says major companies must get government permission before launching any AI products. But on 15 March, the IT ministry issued a new advisory which supersedes the previous one.

As per the new advisory- “Under-tested/unreliable Artificial Intelligence foundational model(s)/ LLM/Generative Al, software(s) or algorithm(s) or further development on such models should be made available to users in India only after appropriately labeling the possible inherent fallibility or unreliability of the output generated.”

“The advisory is issued in suppression of advisory…dated 1st March 2024,” the advisory said.

Revised AI Advisory by IT Ministry

However, the advisory issued by the IT ministry was not publicly issued, IT Deputy Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar says “signaling that this is the future of regulation.” He adds: “We are doing it as an advisory today asking you to comply with.”

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This advisory was not applicable for the startup companies but not it has been modified by the ministry.

But now as per the new advisory, Indian firms don’t need to get permission from the government before launching any AI product. Instead, these platforms are now advised to mark “Unreliable” for the testing products. So the users will be aware of the unreliable results produced by the AI products.

“Where any intermediary through its software or any other computer resource permits or facilitates synthetic creation, generation or modification of a text, audio, visual or audio-visual information, in such a manner that such information may be used potentially as misinformation or deepfake, it is advised that such information created generated or modified through its software or any other computer resource is labeled….that such information has been created generated or modified using the computer resource of the intermediary,” the advisory said.

The advisory issued on 1 March by the IT ministry faced criticism from the startup companies and tech giants. Also, many of them stated it was a “Bad move by India”.

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“I was foolish to think that I would work on bringing GenAI to Indian agriculture from SF,” said Prateek Desai, founder of startup Kisan AI”.” We were training a multimodal low-cost pest and disease model, and we were so excited about it. This is terrible and demotivating after working 4yrs full-time bringing AI to this domain in India.”- He added.

Many industry experts said that this move can leave us behind in the field of generative AI and we are already lacking in this field. After all these controversies in the issued advisory, the government has not decided to remove the permit required for releasing any IA products. Instead, the government has now asked the tech firms to “appropriately” label the “possible and inherent fallibility or unreliability” of the output generated by their AI models.