Hopeful of global AI safety rules in 6-8 months: MoS IT Chandrasekhar

New Delhi will host a three-day global summit from December 12 where countries will attempt to finalise the contours of a framework to ensure safe usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI). 

The Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) summit will focus on various critical aspects of AI, including responsible AI, data governance, future of work, and innovation and commercialisation, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said. 

The minister, who recently represented India at the UK AI Safety Summit 2023, said there was a consensus among the countries to create a global framework to address user-harm issues, such as workforce disruption, impact on privacy, non-criminal harms, and weaponisation of AI. At a ministerial roundtable, he discussed the importance of building a shared understanding of the risks of Frontier AI and future collaboration.

“By April-May 2024, another AI Safety summit will be held in South Korea, by which time, in the next six-eight months, we are hoping to have a global framework around AI safety in place, which will be first discussed during the GPAI summit in India next month,” Chandrashekar said in a press interaction on Friday. “Our (India’s) own approach to regulating emerging technologies will find a focus in the GPAI and the India AI summit,” he said, 

The GPAI is a congregation of 28 member countries and the European Union. India had joined the group as a founding member in 2020. The summit will be attended by industry leaders, policymakers, domain experts, and other stakeholders from 29 countries.

“The AI safety summit held in the UK had two broad criteria: it is a group of countries along with civil society, researchers, and academics sitting down and talking about the future of AI on one hand, and about the safety and trust in AI on the other,” said Chandrashekhar.

During the summit in the UK, he called for a globally coordinated response to the bad actors who may create unsafe and untrusted models, and cause harm. The minister said the UK summit had shown that countries understand the need to come to a common ground on regulating the emerging technology. 

When asked about the expected timeline for agreement of the new framework, the minister said: “We should in the next three to six months agree on the framework. The urgency should be clearly understood because AI is not slowing down its velocity and innovation continues at hyper speed. The governments and ministers sitting around for three years to have intellectual debates is certainly not the Indian approach.”

The UK event was the world’s inaugural global summit dedicated to deliberating the future of AI on a global scale and its associated risks. It hosted delegates from 28 countries, including businesspeople, civil society representatives, AI experts, and personalities, including tech billionaire Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. 

The summit ended with the signing of The Bletchley Declaration by the 29 participating members. 

“We resolve to sustain an inclusive global dialogue that engages existing international forums and other relevant initiatives and contributes in an open manner to broader international discussions, and to continue research on frontier AI safety to ensure that the benefits of the technology can be harnessed responsibly for good and for all,” read the declaration document.