Regulation on deepfakes soon, two semicon units operational now: Vaishnaw

The government is going to bring a regulation on deepfakes soon that will take help of technology for efficient implementation, Union electronics and IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Saturday.

Speaking at the NDTV World Summit, the minister said that chips are key for building AI infrastructure and two semiconductor units, CG Semi and Kaynes, have started production in the country.

Vaishnaw said that there are six Ai models getting developed in the country, out of which two will use around 120 billion parameters and will be free from biases like western models have.

He said that AI in several cases is being used in a positive way and for fun that must be encouraged, but there is need to save the society from the significant harms which can be caused by using deepfakes where one's voice and face can be presented to give out a message which is absolutely disconnected with the person.

"It's your right to make sure that your face and your voice should not be used in a harmful way for society. That's the thought process by which we are approaching this topic. And we will very soon bring out regulations on the deepfakes," Vaishnaw said.

He said the government is taking a techno-legal approach for building the framework.

"We believe that the world of AI cannot be regulated simply by passing a law. There has to be a technical solution to it. So that technical solution plus a regulation combined with it is going to be more effective than, let's say, the European Union where they simply focus on regulating things. Our bias is more towards innovation. As a country and as a government, we are focused more on innovation," Vaishnaw said.

The Ministry of Electronics and IT had earlier in March 2024 issued an advisory to curb potential harm from AI, especially deepfake under IT Rules 2021.

The minister said that the government's approach is to encourage innovation in AI, which involves several building blocks from AI compute infrastructure to building indigenous chipsets.

He said that the government has made available 38,000 GPUs (graphics processing units) for AI development and Google has also committed $ 15 billion for setting up a major AI hub.

"We are inviting other large players to come and set up the computer facility in India. Once we have the computer, then the ability to do good research and the ability to develop AI applications will significantly increase. So Google has come with a $ 15 billion investment. I think Meta is also working on another investment," Vaishnaw said.

Google recently made a commitment to invest $ 15 billion in Visakhapatnam over a period of next five years.