Global Tech Leaders Praise India's Responsible AI Initiatives at GPAI Summit
Praise has been showered upon India by global tech leaders for its commitment to ensuring the ethical, safe, trusted, and responsible development of artificial intelligence (AI). Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced that India is poised to lead discussions on a global declaration document on AI at the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) summit in the capital. Vaishnaw expressed confidence in reaching a consensus to establish responsible AI frameworks with appropriate safeguards.
He said 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.
Ivana Bartoletti, Global Privacy Officer at Wipro Limited, emphasized that India is set to significantly impact responsible AI development through its pioneering data privacy legislation and proposed regulations addressing deepfakes. Bartoletti, also the founder of the 'Women Leading in AI Network,' highlighted India's creation of a secure and robust digital data protection bill, distinguishing it 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 and 27 countries signed a declaration pledging to work on assessing risks linked with AI. "This will certainly be a theme at the GPAI that technology should not be demonized to a point that we regulate it out of existence and innovation. We have been talking about openness, safety 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".
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 said.
Walter Sun, the Global Head of AI at SAP, a leading cloud software company, asserted that entities like the government and other stakeholders can gain valuable insights from companies like SAP to facilitate the necessary information for sound AI-related decision-making. During a recent discussion, Sun, an industry veteran with over 18 years of experience, emphasized that well-informed governments are better positioned to make enlightened decisions, fostering innovation without adversely affecting 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.
