Digital jurisprudence in India, in an AI era

Sub: Science and tech

Sec: Awareness in IT

Context:

The rapidly-evolving technology does pose a challenge to existing legal frameworks and judicial precedents that have been designed for a pre-AI world.

What is Generative AI:

Generative AI (GAI) stands as a transformative force, wielding power to revolutionize society in ground-breaking ways, existing legal frameworks and judicial precedents that have been designed for a pre-AI world may struggle to effectively govern this rapidly-evolving technology.
Generative AI or generative artificial intelligence refers to the use of AI to create new content, like text, images, music, audio, and videos.
Generative AI is powered by foundation models (large AI models) that can multi-task and perform out-of-the-box tasks, including summarization, Q&A, classification, and more.

Safe harbor and liability fixation:

One of the most persistent and contentious issues in Internet governance has been the fixing of liability on “intermediaries” for content hosted by them.
The landmark Shreya Singhal judgment upholded Section 79 of the IT Act which grants intermediaries ‘safe harbor’ protection against hosting content, contingent upon meeting the due diligence requirements outlined in Section 3(1)(b) of the Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules.
In Christian Louboutin Sas vs Nakul Bajaj and Ors (2018), the Delhi High Court held that safe harbour protection applies solely to “passive” intermediaries, referring to entities functioning as mere conduits or passive transmitters of information.
Section 16 of Indian Copyright Act 1957 specifically provides that “no person” shall be entitled to protection of copyright except by the provisions of the Act.
The 161st Parliamentary Standing Committee Report found that the Copyright Act of 1957 is “not well equipped to facilitate authorship and ownership by Artificial Intelligence”.
ChatGPT’s ‘Terms of Use’ attempt to shift liability to the user for any illegal output.
The landmark K.S.Puttaswamy judgment (2017) by the Supreme Court of India established a strong foundation for privacy jurisprudence in the country, leading to the enactment of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP).

About Right to Erasure:

The right to erasure is also known as ‘the right to be forgotten’.
The right is not absolute and only applies in certain circumstances.
The DPDP Act introduces the “right to erasure“ as well as “right to be forgotten”.

Large language model (LLM):

A large language model is a computational model notable for its ability to achieve general-purpose language generation and other natural language processing tasks such as classification.
LLMs are trained on huge sets of data — hence the name “large.”
LLMs are built on machine learning: specifically, a type of neural network called a transformer model.