The Indian IT Ministry has issued an advisory asking tech companies to be "careful" before they deploy any artificial intelligence product, such as a ChatGPT-style chatbot, for public use.
The advisory, issued by the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on Friday, comes in the wake of another advisory issued in December warning companies against the perils of deepfake technology.
"We issued the first advisory in December to deal with deepfakes and misinformation. Deepfakes are essentially misinformation powered by AI and yesterday (March 1) evening, we issued one more advisory, which is a continued one that advises intermediaries and platforms that use AI, to be very careful about deploying on the public internet in India and allowing access to consumers," Junior IT Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar told ANI.
The minister said the advisory was meant to prevent such gaffe as were seen being made by Google's GenAI platform Gemini "where they were clearly in violation of the law by outputting unlawful content."
Chandrasekhar said even if a platform is "under testing or unreliable, it does not absolve them from the consequences of the law, especially criminal law."
"So we advise that any such platform must have a label that says it is under testing. And most importantly, must inform the consumer through a consent mechanism that it may output erroneous and unreliable information," he added.
The Minister of State had last month announced that the government will unveil the initial draft of its artificial intelligence regulatory framework by June-July this year.
