World Economic Forum 2024: Smriti Irani advocates for consensus on watermarking AI products

During a session at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum being held at Davos in Switzerland, Union Minister Smriti Irani stressed the need for such a move ‘so that nations at large have a balanced approach towards emerging technologies.'

Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta Platforms Inc., echoed similar views in a separate session. Aligning the industry on common standards to identify AI-generated content, such as by watermarking images and videos, should be the issue “in the front of the queue,” Clegg said, as reported by Bloomberg.

National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) in India President Debjani Ghosh ‘trust and inclusion’ are key to AI scalability. “…and that's where the world will benefit by looking at India and what we are doing with technology,” she stated.

According to IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna artificial intelligence (AI) will be equal or even bigger than the steam engine revolution and India is going be to at the forefront of AI deployment.

Speaking at a Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 17, Krishna said, “India will be at the forefront of AI deployment. Given the scale of India’s data sets, it will be remarkably useful. I have to applaud the Indian government’s in initiatives in AI, and building AI centres of excellence,” he said.

On January 18, speaking in the Davos session 'Technology in a Turbulent World', OpenAI CEO Sam Altman explained where he sees AI heading.

While AI is widely expected to lead to job growth and job losses, Altman predicts it will change certain roles by giving people space to come up with ideas and curate decisions.

He added, “AI is going to be a global force for good. We believe it is equal or bigger than steam engine revolution. We are a firm believer that India will be massive beneficiary of AI. Workforce that is going to deploy AI will come from India.”

Part of being able to trust technology involves understanding how it works. But Altman says truly understanding how generative AI operates will be "a little different" than people think now.

"I can't look in your brain to understand why you're thinking what you're thinking. But I can ask you to explain your reasoning and decide if that sounds reasonable to me or not.

"I think our AI systems will also be able to do the same thing. They'll be able to explain to us in natural language the steps from A to B, and we can decide whether we think those are good steps, even if we're not looking into it to see each connection."

He underscored that productivity gains will grow as people use AI.

"Even with its very limited current capability and its very deep flaws, people are finding ways to use [this tool] for great productivity gains or other gains and understand the limitations.

"People understand tools and the limitations of tools more than we often give them credit for. People have found ways to make ChatGPT super useful to them and understand what not to use it for, for the most part."