Syllabus: Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors
Context
- AI-Generated Deepfakes: Synthetically created images and videos proliferating on social media through generative AI technology.
- Easy Creation: Photorealistic content is now generated simply by typing scene descriptions using AI tools.
- Rapid Development: Technology evolved significantly throughout 2024, raising concerns about electoral integrity and disinformation.
- AI Slop Pervasiveness: Spread from low-budget advertisements to high-budget political caricatures across digital platforms.
Government Intervention
- India’s User Base: The World’s second-largest AI user base faces an unclear problem scale regarding AI content identification.
- Mandatory Labelling: The Union government proposed compulsory AI-generated content labelling through the IT Rules, 2021 amendment.
- Global Conversation: Initiative advances international discourse on navigating the synthetic media phenomenon effectively.
Justification for Action
- Virality Risk: Like pre-AI misinformation, misleading content can explode into virality gaining disproportionate democratic influence.
- Technology Improvement: Photorealistic content creation technology is improving weekly, deceiving more people increasingly.
- Celebrity Complaints: Public personalities frequently complain, sometimes legally, about unauthorised likeness usurpation for unscrupulous projects.
Industry Response
- Voluntary Initiatives: Large social media and AI firms offered labelling of synthetic content’s accessibility.
- Meta’s Decision: Facebook decided to label AI-generated content last year for user transparency.
- Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) Coalition: Brings industry players together addressing “digital provenance” issues borrowing art appraisal concepts.
Regulatory Concerns
- Legislative Instrument: Subordinate legislation may not be ideal; IT Rules already regulate streaming, removals, gaming without parliamentary testing.
- Parliamentary Review: Rules need explicit consideration by people’s representatives ensuring democratic accountability.
- Innovation Lag: Technology policymakers acknowledge that regulation typically lags behind innovation throughout the Internet era.
Way Forward
- Dynamic Follow-up: Government must aggressively pursue proposal with agile action adapting to technological changes.
- Regulatory Flexibility: Relax outdated rules and introduce new ones according to emerging requirements and challenges.