The servants of Clown World are going to find themselves in a lot of legal jeopardy in the coming years as they gradually discover that they don’t have the free pass to break the law with the BRICSIA nations that they have historically possessed in the skinsuit West:
Indian users took to X (formerly Twitter) to draw the government’s attention to Gemini’s response to a question on whether Modi is a “fascist.” The tool replied that the prime minister’s policies have been “characterized as fascist” by experts due to the BJP’s “Hindu nationalist ideology, crackdown on dissent, and its use of violence on religious minorities.”
In contrast, the tool adopted a milder tone when asked the same questions about former US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.
Reacting to the X post, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s minister of state for electronic and information technology, claimed that Gemini violated the Information Technology Act and several provisions of the criminal code.
“These are direct violations of Rule 3(1)(b) of Intermediary Rules (IT rules) of the IT act and violations of several provisions of the Criminal code.“
“We’ve worked quickly to address this issue,” Google said in a statement amid the backlash, adding that Gemini is “built as a creativity and productivity tool” and may not “always be reliable.” In response, Chandrasekhar made it clear that invoking the ‘unreliability’ of AI models does not exempt tech platforms from the law. He also warned that India’s digital citizens are “not to be experimented on with unreliable platforms and algorithms.”
It’s a fascinating defense. “Sure, we openly and very publicly broke the law, but that’s okay because our tools are unreliable.” How is that any sort of legally-acceptable excuse? Russia and China have already demonstrated the way in which national sovereignty trumps corporate unaccountability, now it is time for the rest of the world to follow suit.
It would be good to see these multinational corporations being held to the same standards that young men posting memes on Twitter are held. If corporations are legal persons, why are they not held accountable to the law in precisely the same way as other people? The state can’t imprison a corporation, but the state could certainly imprison the executives responsible or revoke a corporation’s charter for the appropriate period of time.