Digital 'nagriks' not to be experimented on with unreliable AI: Meity

Union minister said the safety and trust of Indian users is a legal obligation of internet platforms, and their actions can't be exempted from law

Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Saturday reprimanded Google India, alleging a bias in the responses of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) conversational tool, Gemini.

Warning the tech giant of possible action against algorithmic bias, Chandrasekhar in a post on X (formerly Twitter) said, “Government has said this before and I repeat for the attention of Google India, our digital nagriks are not to be experimented on with "unreliable" platforms, algorithms and models.”

He further said that the safety and trust of Indian users is a legal obligation of internet platforms, and their actions can't be exempted from law.

Chandrasekhar’s response came after Google India acknowledged the issue and said that it was working towards addressing it.

In an official statement on the issue, the company said, “We’ve worked quickly to address this issue. Gemini is built as a creativity and productivity tool and may not always be reliable, especially when it comes to responding to some prompts about current events, political topics, or evolving news. This is something that we’re constantly working on improving.”

The controversy erupted on Friday when a user took to social media platform x, and posted screenshots of responses to questions where he had asked Google's AI tool - whether PM Modi, former US President Donald Trump, Pakistan's Imran Khan, Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky were fascists.

The user alleged that the responses to these questions were biased towards the Indian Prime Minister, and ‘downright malicious’.

Responding to the post, Minister Chandrasekhar had said the responses were direct violations of Rule 3(1)(b) of the Intermediary Rules (IT rules) of the IT Act and violations of several provisions of the Criminal Code, hinting towards a possibility of legal action against the tech giant.

Google further in its detailed statement on the issue said, “Gemini is built in line with our AI Principles, and has safeguards to anticipate and test for a wide range of safety risks. We also prioritise identifying and preventing harmful or policy-violating responses from showing in Gemini.”

“We take information quality seriously across our products, and have developed protections against low-quality information along with tools to help people learn more about the information they see online,” said the company.