New Delhi: “Is Modi a fascist?” Google’s AI tool, Gemini, had said yes, while it was iffy when asked the same thing about US ex-President, Donald Trump and Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Some journalists in India went onto post that they are angry about how AI was unequivocal about India’s prime minister and fascism.
The Modi government threatened to prosecute AI chatbots, after one of the journalists tagged India’s junior Information Technology minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar on X and urged the government to “take note”.
In less than 12 hours, the minister responded, “These are direct violations of Rule 3(1)(b) of Intermediary Rules (IT rules) of the IT act and violations of several provisions of the Criminal code. @GoogleAI @GoogleIndia @GoI_MeitY”.
The minister did not explain how a statement of fact about Modi – “he has been accused of implementing policies that some experts have characterised as fascist” – violates an law. Rule 3(1)(b) only directs intermediaries (in this case Google and Google Gemini) to “make reasonable efforts to cause the users not to host, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit, store, update or share, among others, information which deceives or misleads the addressee about the origin of the message or knowingly and intentionally communicates any misinformation or information which is patently false and untrue or misleading in nature, or impersonates another person.” How the tool violates the rule’s provisions, is hard to explain.
Google buckled quickly.
Semafor cited an internal memo on Gemini from Google CEO Sundar Pichai in which he said, “I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias – to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable and we got it wrong.”
