Racist, sexist, casteist: Is AI bad news for India?
In both cases, most of those charged were Muslim, leading human rights groups and tech experts to criticise India's use of the AI-based technology to target poor, minority and marginalised groups in Delhi and elsewhere in the country.
Elevate Your Tech Process with High-Value Skill Courses
Offering CollegeCourseWebsiteNorthwestern UniversityKellogg Post Graduate Certificate in Product ManagementVisitNorthwestern UniversityKellogg Post Graduate Certificate in Digital MarketingVisitIndian School of BusinessISB Digital TransformationVisitIndian School of BusinessISB Applied Business AnalyticsVisit As India rolls out AI tools that authorities say will increase efficiency and improve access, tech experts fear the lack of an official policy for the ethical use of AI will hurt people at the bottom, entrenching age-old bias, criminalising minorities and channeling most benefits to the rich.
«It is going to directly affect the people living on the fringes — the Dalits, the Muslims, the trans people. It will exacerbate bias and discrimination against them,» said Shivangi Narayan, a researcher who has studied predictive policing in Delhi.
With a population of 1.4 billion powering the world's fifth-biggest economy, India is undergoing breakneck technological change, rolling out AI-based systems — in spheres from health to education, agriculture to criminal justice — but with scant debate on their ethical implications, experts say.
In a nation beset by old and deep divisions, be it of class, religion, gender or wealth, researchers like Narayan — a member of the Algorithmic Governance Research Network — fear that AI risks exacerbating all these schisms.
«We think technology works objectively. But the databases being used to train AI
