Private members’ bills on AI to be tabled in Rajya Sabha

New Delhi: At a time concerns are raised worldwide over Artificial Intelligence (AI) and deep fakes, two Rajya Sabha MPs are all set to introduce three private members bills to ensure that AI regime is regulated and does not eat up jobs indiscriminately.

CPI floor leader P Sandosh Kumar’s ‘The National Artificial Intelligence Regulatory Authority Bill, 2024 and Trinamool Congress MP Mausam Noor’s ‘The Workforce Rights (Artificial Intelligence) Bill, 2023 and ‘The Deep Fake Prevention and Criminalisation Bill, 2023 are listed for introduction in the Upper House on Friday afternoon.

Noor’s Bill on rights of workforce insists that employers must obtain “explicit and informed consent” from employees before implementing AI technologies that directly affect their work or rights. Implementation of AI should also ensure that biases in AI algorithms that could have an impact on employees are erased.

The government should take measures to ensure transparency in the utilisation of AI technologies within the workplace, the Bill said adding, employees should also have the right to refuse tasks solely based on AI-generated processes if they feel it violates their rights or ethical standards. 

It also wants the government to design an equality impact assessment as part of the AI implementation process, ensuring fairness, non-discrimination and compliance with established regulations. Employees also should be given proper training to adapt to AI technology.

Kumar’s Bill wants the proposed National Artificial Intelligence Regulatory Authority (NAIRA) to formulate a comprehensive policy to identify key privacy challenges of AI including bias, privacy, misinterpretation challenge and employment loss challenges. 

The Authority should also have powers to inquire into complaints about deprivation of rights of  workers as a result of replacing human labour with AI and act as a national-level grievance redress  mechanism in matters related to AI, machine learning and deep fake. 

Noor’s Bill on deep fakes proposes setting up a National Deep Fake Mitigation and Digital Authenticity Task Force to evaluate the prevalence of deep fakes affecting the citizens, businesses in India and the functioning of the union and state governments and the influence of digital content forgery and deep fake on civic participation, including the electorate.

It also proposes an evaluation of the possibility of incorporating a visual protection feature, similar to streaming apps, where individuals who do not provide consent for screenshots or sharing have their content displayed as a black screen.