The recent powerful developments in generative AI and the project's pace of adoption of this revolutionary technology across industries have got people both excited and worried about the future. The excitement comes from the promise of GenAI to massively improve industrial productivity, boost economic growth and scale humanitarian efforts. The worry comes from our unpreparedness to effectively tackle the fast-evolving universe of societal harms anticipated with the adoption of GenAI. 

Recognizing the fast-paced nature of the technological and regulatory developments impacting Generative AI (GenAI) practice, nasscom released a set of guidelines that will be instrumental in defining frameworks and act as common standards and protocols for researching, developing, and using GenAI responsibly in India. The draft guidelines result from consultations with the technology industry, a multi-disciplinary group of AI experts, researchers, and practitioners, with representations from academia and civil society.  

The document intends to build stakeholder consensus on the core normative obligations of those researching, developing or using GenAI technologies. The nasscom team expect the guidelines to become instrumental in defining frameworks for the development of standards, protocol, audit checklists, certifications, monitoring and evaluation mechanisms and another form of actionable guidance, tools and best practices to effectively mitigate potential harms from the adoption of GenAI. 

Alkesh Kumar Sharma, Secretary of MeitY, opined that the current pace of innovation in AI tools and platforms had created enormous opportunities and risks that every country is looking at. In his opinion, self-governance is a useful tool to fill the gap between innovation and regulation, and the technology industry should urge to lead by example by taking these guidelines to the next step of adoption and building practices and tools that can be used across all sectors. 

Focus area 

The key focus area of the guidelines lies in research, development and use in relation to GenAI. It intends to promote and facilitate responsible development and use of GenAI solutions by different stakeholders. The guidelines also intend to achieve a robust, common understanding of normative obligations amongst stakeholders to aid them in improving their net social impact with GenAI and foster trust in adopting GenAI across the industries.  

According to Debjani Ghosh, President of nasscom, “the guidelines by nasscom is a first-of-its-kind initiative in the world that involves the industry to collaboratively create a self-governance framework that benefits all stakeholders”. She called the effort a proactive step towards building a transparent and robust roadmap for the responsible build and use of AI. 

Tackling the challenges 

"The guidelines would help the ecosystem unleash the true potential of AI, creating a future that harmoniously blends human ingenuity with technological advancement", said Anant Maheshwari, Chairperson, nasscom, President, Microsoft India. 

The guidelines seek to mitigate harms associated with the research, development and use of GenAI technologies. These include the proliferation of misinformation, disinformation and hateful content. It aims to overcome the issues created by infringing intellectual property and privacy harms by violating data protection norms and standards. 

Bias is one of the critical challenges that the guidelines spread awareness of, alongside problems relating to job displacement, environmental challenges and a surge in cyber-attacks. 

The guidelines detail the obligations of those: 

• Conducting fundamental and applied research on GenAI models, applications, tools and techniques  
• Engaged in the development of GenAI solutions  
• Using GenAI solutions for commercial, non-commercial, or personal purposes 
• And joint obligation of researchers, developers, and users. 

According to Srikanth Velamakanni, Chair, Nasscom AI Advisory Group, Group CEO, Fractal AI, "generative AI is a paradigm shift in AI capability". He believes this intelligence will be embedded as a foundational layer across every product, service, or process, opening a whole new world of use cases.  

For India, this represents an opportunity to solve complex challenges at scale, augment productivity, boost GDP and become a meaningful global AI player. However, it is equally important to do this responsibly, evaluating all potential risks and harm.