Introduction
India has taken the first step towards guiding its citizens, policy makers and businesses to regulate and manage the new era of opportunities opened up by the generative AI based innovations. We have been working hard to promote innovation, promote our artists and protect our citizens from the threats of misinformation and fake news. The new guidelines are expected to provide the foundations to define our success in navigating the fast paced technological landscape. As the very first definition of an emerging technological innovation, the definitions and the procedures established in the Digital Media Ethics Code will be widely referenced and used in other areas of policy making and thus has the utmost importance.
Expectations
Complete, non-ambiguous definition of the content being handled, establish context and standard operating procedures for content creators, users, advertisers, content creation tools, social media intermediaries and enforcement.
- Establishes simple guidelines for the non-tech savvy consumers and users
- Freedom of expression and the Rights of the artist creating the content are given utmost importance
- Technical accuracy and clear definition of procedures is established
The definition
“(wa) ‘synthetically generated information’ means information which is artificially or algorithmically created, generated, modified or altered using a computer resource, in a manner that such information reasonably appears to be authentic or true;”
Terms used:
Algorithmically [Terms], expanded in the table below:
Procedures
The procedures must be invoked by various personas namely, creator, Tools or platforms used for content creation,
- Content Creator
The artist, aka content creator is the most important person in the room and decides the idea and intention behind the content, plans and decides the creation of the tool and is in the position to adequately categorize the content.
No definition, guidelines or procedures are provided for the original content creator. This means creative artists, photographers, editors and similar professionals who might be in a better position to provide accurate categorization of the synthetic content are not considered in the process. This gap combined with the lack of clarity in the definition regarding photographs or videos edited with a computer resource, Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) etc creates a huge difficulty in establishing well defined categorization of content.
The lack of clarity might adversely impact the creative individual whose content might be incorrectly labelled as “synthetic content” . The artists are creators who are the least powerful and most vulnerable category whose rights must be protected and are left out at the mercy of powerful platforms.
Questions:
- Is a photograph “modified” with an image editor and “reasonably appears to be authentic or true” Synthetic Content ?
- An image or video, which “reasonably appears to be authentic or true” created using a computer resource” Similar to Tigers used in Oscar winning movies like RRR & Life of a Pi falls under the definition of “Synthetic Content” ?
2. Intermediary offering Generation of Content
The procedure itself is well defined for the platform offering content generation services however the practical implications seems to be missed out. Categorization who exactly falls under the category of content creation or which content falls under the category is also unclear due to the lack of completeness and ambiguity in the original definition of synthetic content.
Few practical scenarios & Questions:
- A platform offers end to end Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) as a service which doesn’t use Generative AI (LLM) technology. Do they classify as “intermediary” under the definition of intermediary offering generative content ?
- End to End music generation platforms will be required to insert a 10% message to a one hour long music its computer systems generate ?
- In the case of movies and commercials created with CGI the same procedures apply ?
- In the case of full length movies and video content, the 10% visual notice needs to be shown during the entire duration of the video ?
3. Intermediary hosting & publishing
The procedure for the intermediary doesn’t include a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) & Acceptable minimal standards. This combined with the ambiguity in the definition of synthetic content, creates huge challenges for the intermediary to categories and introduce procedures to detect objectionable content and derive upon actionable conclusions.
Conclusion
Rather than considering the challenge in a silo, a holistic approach is needed to assess the impact on entire industries like media and advertising, startup eco-system, business processes and needs to come up with a comprehensive plan to establish regulations. The definition of the new type of content category must be non-ambiguous, complete and context free to be used across different scenarios and industries. The guardrails must be empowering startups, innovation and must take care of the rights of content creators.
Recommendations
- Concerns, Rights & Freedom of expression of artists must given utmost importance in defining the content categories and process
- Complete, non-ambiguous definition of technical terminology and context must be established
- In the case of intermediaries, well defined standard operating procedures must be established with participation from the subject matter experts and industry participation. Precedence is established in Re: Prajjwala for industry participation.
References & Terms
- https://web.archive.org/web/20251110072231/https://www.meity.gov.in/static/uploads/2025/10/9de47fb06522b9e40a61e4731bc7de51.pdf
- CGI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-generated_imagery
- Generative Artificial Intelligence: https://csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/generative_artificial_intelligence
- Re: Prajjwala https://wilmap.stanford.edu/entries/re-prajwala