The advisory will be issued soon after the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) Summit in New Delhi ends on Thursday, he said, warning of “even tighter rules” if companies fail to follow it.

“There is no separate regulation for deepfakes—existing regulations already cover it under Rule 3(1)(b) (v) of IT Rules, 2021,” he said in an interview. “We are now seeking 100% enforcement by the platforms, and for the platforms to be more proactive—including alignment of terms of use, and educating users of 12 no-go areas —which they should have done by now, but have not. As a result, we are issuing an advisory to them,” Chandrasekhar said.

However, the scope to tighten regulations remains, subject to companies reacting to the coming advisory.

“If they still do not adhere to it, we’ll go back and amend the rules and make them even tighter in case of any ambiguity. The advisory is ready, and as soon as GPAI is done, we’ll issue it,” Chandrasekhar added.

Chandrasekhar said India’s focus here has been to address specific issues on AI, moving beyond abstract conversations to regulation.

“GPAI is about creating a real roadmap for the next five months, and not just on the abstract issues around AI. There are two clear themes—one, to ensure that AI is not demonized, and propel India’s view on the use-cases of AI.

The second is on taking a global granular effort on AI guidelines and principles based on global agreement, so that by the time we reach the Korea Safety Summit six months later, there’s a reasonably clear understanding on how to harmonize regulations,” he added.

The minister said the Indian approach to regulating AI is different to those of global leaders such as the US and the EU.

“The US approach has so far been around regulation to lift the markets. The EU has focused on regulations for citizen rights. India is showing a middle path—not sacrificing innovation to protect citizens, or vice versa.”

That is the way forward for AI—development of a framework that will grow the power of AI to solve leading problems for humanity, while ensuring that AI is not misused in harm.”

India will also host the India AI Programme next month, Chandrasekhar said, which will lay down India’s domestic AI policy going forward—especially around building ample compute power for domestic AI research and use.

“What we’ve lacked is real, cutting-edge, scaled AI compute—and organized, quality datasets that are legal, diverse, high-quality and curated. These two are part of our India AI Programme that we’ll launch on 10 January,” he said.

The AI policy will recommend a collaborative approach between the public and private sectors. Chandrasekhar added that whether development of AI compute for domestic needs requires incentives from the government will be considered later.

The India AI Programme will also lay down the groundwork for access to resources for academics, as well as facilitating startups in various AI subsets.

“Lack of access to resources for academia is partly true. But, under the National Supercomputing Mission, a lot of AI compute capacity has been built. For IIT Delhi, we’ve recently sanctioned a ₹400 crore AI compute lab. There are these capacities available already, but what will catalyze the AI research ecosystem is the launch of the India AI Program. This will bring serious critical mass for AI compute and datasets. It’ll also have funding for startups, as well as innovation research centres,” Chandrasekhar said.

He added that startups will “play a big role in AI, just like we’ve seen in space and other sectors.”

“There will be space for big tech corporates, both foreign and Indian, and a huge ecosystem of startups as well,” he said.

Earlier in the day, Chandrasekhar highlighted that such AI developments will also create “a huge talent deficit in the field of AI. There is an urgent need for our academic institutions, whether in the UK, Japan or India, to really understand this and start delivering the talent that this AI ecosystem will require,” he said.

On Tuesday, prime minister Narendra Modi said at the inaugural keynote of GPAI 2023 that India is “fully committed to the development of responsible and ethical use cases of AI.” Union IT minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, said in his keynote that a consensus-based declaration on use of AI in sustainable agriculture, as well as adopting a Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) model for AI, are up for discussions at GPAI.