To ensure that enterprises build responsible artificial intelligence (AI) models, the government will share the public data available with it only with firms which have a proven track record and can be categorised as trusted sources.
Speaking to Fe, minister of state for electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that such a step will ensure that firms follow good practices in terms of protecting citizens’ personal data and other digital governance mechanism put in place by the government.
“Every AI model which exists has been trained on Indian datasets in addition to other datasets. So far companies had free and unrestricted access to citizens’ data which was used for purposes for which consent was not taken,” Chandrasekhar said. “However, going forward government datasets will only be shared with safe and trusted AI platform,” he added.
Though private companies have their own datasets which they use for building AI models, the government’s dataset is much richer because it is the repository of data which citizens need to mandatorily submit for various purposes like passports, driving licence, beneficiary schemes etc. Anonymised datasets are built on the basis of these personal data by generalising them in terms of age profiles, and other similar broad nomenclatures.
Under the India AI programme, the government is working on creating an India datasets platform in a public-private partnership model, which will have the largest collection of anonymised data to drive innovation and enhance capabilities of AI applications.
“The moment all of this anonymised personal data is available on the India datasets platform, we will have the power to curate access to Indian startups, Indian research community, Indian companies, and any other foreign company that we believe is building a trusted AI model,” Chandrasekhar said.
Sharing public datasets with only trusted companies will also ensure that the onus of checking misinformation, deepfakes, AI biasness etc lie with them.
Lately, the government had made it clear that any instances of bias in the content generated through algorithms, search engines or AI models of platforms like Google Bard, ChatGPT, and others will not be entitled to protection under the safe harbour clause of Section 79 of the Information Technology Act.
Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekharan had also earlier talked about the potential of creating a data empowerment and protection architecture (DEPA) by a public-private partnership model. DEPA is a technology architecture that will provide data empowerment and protection architecture creating the necessary public infrastructure architecture on which private applications can be built.
Speaking at an industry seminar in August, Chandrasekharan had said that Digital Personal Data Protection law has created an architecture for making private applications on the Internet using public data, while maintaining complete privacy.
