AI will create jobs even as some roles go away: IT Secretary

AI will create jobs even as some roles go away: IT Secretary

NITI Aayog study shows jobs in the regular coding programming side of IT/ITeS will go away, but many more jobs can be created, says S. Krishnan

Artificial intelligence (AI) will create jobs even as some roles go away, said Union Secretary for Electronics and Information Technology S. Krishnan.

In a wide-ranging conversation with The Hindu on the upcoming AI Impact Summit, India’s semiconductor ambitions, and how the IT Ministry’s role in digital governance, he said, “NITI Aayog has done a study which shows that yes, undoubtedly some jobs in the regular coding programming side of IT/ITeS will go away, but we can create many more jobs in terms of what else can happen.”

“We have had conversations with many of the people in the IT industry,” Mr. Krishnan said.

They say many of the coding and programming jobs are difficult to sustain because that can be done by an AI bot. But when you have to create an application, or when you have to create a solution, then you need to have a better domain expertise, like in agriculture or manufacturing. The deployment of the application takes human resources,” he said.

The government would try its best to use the existing legal framework for AI, with some “tweaks,” he added. “If you take, for an example, what we can do with the existing Information Technology Act, that’s one aspect of it,” he said. “The other part of it is what we need to do in the copyright space. So that is being dealt with in a particular way.”

The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) has released a working paper proposing revenue sharing by AI firms for content they use in training their large language models.

“The other part of it is how other data, personal data gets used,” Mr. Krishnan said. “So, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 fits in there. So, we have some of this regulation which is already in place. Some of it requires tweaking, tightening, and that is what we keep attempting to do.”

Earlier in the week, the IT Ministry introduced requirements to label AI-generated content. “Labelling is in terms of a right to know,” Mr. Krishnan said, arguing that users had a right to identify inauthentic imagery.

“We all have a right to know if what we’re seeing is artificially generated. It’s a very minor requirement and technologically fairly easy to solve for,” he said, pointing out that tech firms have systems to detect deepfakes.

Time limits for court- or government-ordered takedowns were reduced to 2-3 hours from 24-36 hours, Mr. Krishnan said, since “our own experience has been that whenever any such takedowns have been required, most companies did not need more than an hour or two to comply.”