Consent of individual must before creating AI-generated content: Ashwini Vaishnaw

IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw

Synthetic content or content of a person generated with the help of AI should not be created without the consent of the individual, information and broadcasting and IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on February 26.

"Synthetic content should not be generated without the consent of the person whose face or voice or personality has been used to create the content. Time has come to make that big inflectional change," he said at the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) Conclave.

Vaishnaw largely spoke on the how trust -- a principle which has bound various pillars of human society, which includes media, legislature and judiciary, has been under challenge lately. He attributed that challenge to deepfakes, barrage of disinformation and so on.

"The core tenet of trust is under threat. It is coming in different forms -- deepfakes, things which have never happened anywhere; disinformation.. creating synthetically generated pictures of well respected people, creating videos which have no correlation to AI; and all that content, so-called content/news, when it reaches common people -- they start questioning the basic structure of the society," Vaishnaw said.

He said that the platforms must take responsibility for content such as deepfakes and disinformation that are hosted on their platforms.

"Platforms must wake up, must understand the importance of reinforcing trust in the institutions which human society has created over thousands of years. Platforms must take the responsibility for the content that is hosted by them. The online safety of children, the online safety of all citizens is the responsibility of the platforms. Non-adherence to these principles will definitely make them responsible because the nature of Internet has changed now," he added

Vaishnaw's comments come a few weeks after the government notified amendments to the Information Technology Rules, wherein they contracted the takedown timeline for content flagged by the government from 36 hours to 3 hours.