GPAI Summit: Global tech leaders hail India’s efforts on building responsible AI

New Delhi: Global tech leaders hailed India's efforts toward making artificial intelligence (AI) ethical, safe, trusted and responsible, as Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Monday said the country is confident about negotiating a global declaration document on AI.

India is organising the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) summit in the capital from December 12-14 and according to Vaishnaw, “we will be able to arrive at some consensus” on building responsible AI with certain guardrails.

He told reporters that GPAI will be a large congregation in which startups, policymakers and academia will participate.

“There will be several technical sessions on how to make AI more responsible with proper regulations,” the minister said.

After the successful AI Safety Summit in the UK, the GPAI summit in New Delhi will further deliberate upon the risks associated with AI, before a global framework is reached in South Korea next year.

According to Ivana Bartoletti, Global Privacy Officer, Wipro Limited, India is going to play a crucial role in shaping responsible AI with the first-of-its-kind data privacy legislation and draft regulation over deepfakes.

Bartoletti, who is also the founder of the ‘Women Leading in AI Network’, told IANS that India has carved out a safe and robust digital data protection bill which is different from the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

“The UK AI Summit at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, was a turning point where leaders, including Indian Minister of State for Electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, vouched for robustness, safety and global governance around AI,” she said.

Chandrasekhar attended the UK summit where India, along with 27 countries, signed a declaration pledging to work on the assessment of risks linked with AI.

“This will certainly be a theme at the GPAI that technology should not be demonised to a point that we regulate it out of existence and innovation,” the minister said.

“We have been talking about openness, safety and trust and accountability. We have always argued that innovation must not get ahead of regulation. We have spoken about the need to have safe and trusted platforms,” Chandrasekhar added.

According to Bartoletti, there is an alignment to an extent globally that we've got to use AI in a responsible manner.

“We're trying to achieve a global agreement around what we're going to use AI for, but in particular, what we are not going to use AI for. We're not governing AI or regulating it. We are governing the behaviour of people around AI. So the way that humans develop and deploy AI is really important,” Bartoletti told IANS.

Walter Sun, Global Head of AI at cloud software major SAP, said that the government and other stakeholders can learn a lot from companies like SAP in terms of helping provide the information they need to make robust decisions on AI.

In a recent conversation with IANS, Sun who is an industry veteran with more than 18 years, said that the more informed the governments are on AI, the more enlightened decisions can be made to accelerate innovation without harming end-users.

“The more we connect with the government on building responsible AI together, the more it will also become easier for us to innovate while talking about proper regulations for the whole industry,” he noted.

“We spend a lot of time talking to customers and working on the latest technologies. So governments can learn a lot from us in terms of helping provide the information they need to make better decisions,” the SAP executive noted.