Centre says approval must for under-testing AI platforms before launch

The advisory was issued on Friday evening, more than two months after the Ministry hadissued an advisory in December last yearto social media platforms directing them to follow existing IT rules to deal with the issue of deepfakes.

Speaking to the ANI news agency, Union Minister of State for IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said, “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.”

He said that 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,” the Minister added.

Chandrasekhar said the second advisory was issued so that a “situation we have seen with platforms like Google Gemini (AI model), where they were clearly in violation of the law by outputting unlawful content, is not repeated”.

He further said that this will help “platforms to be a lot more disciplined about taking their AI models and platforms from the lab directly to the market”.

“And we do not want that to happen without sufficient guardrails, information and disclaimers in place, so that consumers know what is unreliable before they start using it,”