During Bill Gates’ 2024 visit to India, he engaged in a wide-ranging, one-on-one conversation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi — a discussion in which PM Modi’s insights on artificial intelligence (AI) seem remarkably prescient.

Gathered at PM Modi’s New Delhi residence, the Prime Minister didn’t mince words: “If we use AI as a magic tool, it will perhaps lead to grave injustice."

In other words, there’s a real need for labelling and watermarking AI-generated content — especially with the ever-growing risk of deepfakes and misinformation.

PM Modi’s words weren’t idle talk. They came on the heels of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issuing an advisory on March 15, 2024 (under the IT Rules, 2021), telling digital intermediaries to clearly mark unreliable AI models and alert users to their potential flaws. The main idea was to employ unique metadata, tags, or watermarks to clearly identify “synthetic" content, ensuring that everyone can distinguish between what is real and what is machine-generated.

Fast forward to January 2025, the Election Commission of India (ECI) upped the ante by making........

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