Artificial intelligence, or AI, has made great strides over the past five years, especially as machine learning and deep learning algorithms have improved and more processing power and data have been accessible. However, only individuals who were genuinely interested in AI or digital technology in general kept up with this development.
When ChatGPT and DALL-E were made available, OpenAI demonstrated their capabilities using straightforward natural language instructions. ChatGPT and AI overnight become topics of conversation in parlours and nook offices. Many people were awestruck by ChatGPT’s wonderful capabilities as they rushed to try it out. Many people who had just a passingfamiliarity with artificial intelligence (AI) before lately began talking about lingo like generative AI, large language models (LLMs), generative adversarial networks (GANs), and heuristics. Massive amounts of data are required before generative AI programmes like Google’s Bard, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and DALL-E can perform stunts that will impress you. These LLMs have been pre-trained on enormous amounts of textual (or occasionally visual) data in order to produce writing and images that are human-like.
Policymakers all over the world had begun worrying about data privacy issues of citizens even before OpenAI and ChatGPT became household names, before LLMs and Generative AI entered the public consciousness, given how Big Tech was sucking up data by giving away services for free or at a throwaway price. To address data concerns, data privacy laws were enacted and improved in numerous nations.
After China, India is currently the second-largest producer of digital data. That has been made possible by our population as well as the government’s emphasis on broadband access and digital services. We have also lagged behind in establishing regulations that can safeguard data privacy.
There is no question about the urgency with which India must write and adopt its data law. But enacting legislation is just the first step. India’s institutional ability to uphold the law has lagged behind Western nations. Ensuring that a law is passed will not be helpful in the digital sphere either if the capacity to adequately enforce it is not established in tandem. Both have emerged as imperatives that cannot be put off any longer.