Working On A Mechanism To Evaluate Safety Of AI: IT Secy

The IT ministry is reportedly building a mechanism to evaluate the safety and trustworthiness of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions.

Prioritising innovation, the ministry aims to avoid stifling regulations, instead focusing on assessment, as per PTI’s report.

“Safe and trusted AI is when you do the innovation, try and be responsible about it but there would be an assessment. We will try and see that it is safe and trusted in a manner that works for everybody. That is the other space that we are working on right now. We don’t want to start with regulation, and regulation, in a sense, would actually hurt innovation in this particular space,” Ministry of Electronics and IT secretary S Krishnan said, as cited in the report.

He was speaking at CII’s Global Economic Policy Forum yesterday (December 12).

It is pertinent to note that Krishnan made similar remarks on regulating AI in a way that it does not deter innovation in the space, in May.

As part of the INDIAai mission, the Centre has tried to make a subtle distinction between responsible AI as defined by the West — which is not expected to be regulated by the government — and safe and trusted AI, he added.

In terms of regulation of AI, he stressed on the need for regulation around harms from AI, misrepresentation and deepfakes, even as there are enough laws in the country to act on misrepresentation, based on the report.

The threat of jobs being replaced by AI in India is not as intense as it is prevalent in the west, remarked Krishnan in the report.

This development comes months after union minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said that deployment of AI must be guided by ethical considerations and robust regulatory framework, in October.

Scindia also urged that the governance of AI and IoT (Internet of Things) should not be an ‘afterthought’, adding that to ensure positive impact of advanced technologies, privacy concern and bias must be addressed.

Meanwhile, earlier this week, Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma called on founders to build AI-first companies and if startups don’t build technology that replaces humans in workflows, it might not survive five years.

The Paytm founder added that all jobs currently being done by humans, physical or mental, will eventually be done by AI-powered machines.

With AI playing a great part in transforming startups today, Inc42 made a survey of more than 50 VCs about GenAI adoption by non-GenAI startups in their portfolios, where 43% said that AI or GenAI is now a key part of their product and service roadmap.

Furthermore, India is currently home to over 200 GenAI startups, which raised more than $1.2 Bn in funding between 2020 and the third quarter (Q3) of 2024.