Government asks firms to take permission to launch AI models

The advisory was sent out to platforms February 29 evening.

The government has asked artificial intelligence platforms to seek its permission before launching an AI product in the country, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on March 2.

All intermediaries have been told to ensure compliance with the advisory, which was issued on March 1 evening,  with immediate effect and to submit an action taken-cum-status report to the ministry within 15 days.

"This signals that we are moving to a regime when a lot of rigour is needed before a product is launched. You don't do that with cars or microprocessors. Why is that for such a transformative tech like AI there are no guardrails between what is in the lab and what goes out to the public," the minister of state for electronics and information technology said.

The government has also advised that AI-generated content be labelled or embedded with a permanent unique metadata or identifier to be able to determine the creator or the first originator of any misinformation or a deepfake.

"If they want to deploy a model that is error-prone, they have to label it as under testing, take government permission and explicitly seek confirmation and consent of the user that it is an error-prone platform. They can't come back later and say it is under testing...," the minister added.

The moves come after a response from Google's Gemini model to a question if Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a fascist generated controversy.

"These are direct violations of Rule 3(1)(b) of Intermediary Rules (IT rules) of the IT act and violations of several provisions of the Criminal code," Chandrasekhar had said at that time. The rules list out the types of content that are prohibited from being published on platforms.

The screenshots of the prompt on Modi shared on social media seemed to insinuate that the Gemini's responses were leaning more towards labelling him as a fascist rather than in the cases of other world leaders.

In a statement, a Google spokesperson said, "We’ve worked quickly to address this issue. Gemini is built as a creativity and productivity tool and may not always be reliable, especially when it comes to responding to some prompts about current events, political topics, or evolving news. This is something that we’re constantly working on improving.”