You must dedicate at least 30 minutes daily to using an AI tool or platform. It is so transformational to your workload and creativity and will only scale up. For me, it’s Midjourney, Dall-E, and ChatGPT-4 in the arsenal currently. Watch YouTube tutorials or play around with them. You’ll get the ropes easily.
One fascinating future for AI is how influential Indians will be in training data. As Indians speak more English and get on the World Wide Web, their contributions and posts will influence AI models more and more. Not just for text-based models but also for imagery. Dall-E is much better at capturing Indian aesthetics and subtle details like tilaks or ornaments than Midjourney currently. I have no idea how they did it, but I find myself shifting to using Dall-E for more “Indian” topics.
Something else I am surprised by is how enthusiastic Indians are for AI. This dovetails with the Indian passion for software in general. Some folks have told me Indians are so into software since it was developed properly in India (whether due to the absence of government or recent guidance of it), but part of me wants a more esoteric explanation - something, something good with abstract thoughts due to Sanskrit grammar based thinking <insert continued WhatsApp rant here>.
For AI, however, I’ve noticed Indians like to use it because it can bring alive what is lost. There are no ancient temples from the pre-Islamic ages in the northern 2/3 of the Indian subcontinent. They have all been either defaced or destroyed. Hence so much of Indian AI content is the reimagining of the past, of architecture and landscapes that haven’t been seen in millennia. Millions of AI generations have been performed to depict the battles and incidents of the Mahabharata, Ramayana, Puranas, Vedas, etc… occurring generations ago.
On the flip side, Indians also like AI for creating a future, albeit with a distinctly Indian flavor. Combining the ancient and anticipatory, I love seeing futuristic Indian cityscapes combining temple and modernist architecture. Another theme I of course see is the freedom from filth. One of the omnipresent elements of high Hindu theology is its emphasis on purity and cleanliness. Au contraire to India currently in many ways. The maximalist nature of so much of Indian aesthetics meshes well with the fractal chaos of AI-generated images. AI offers Indians an escape and hope.
As for how the Indian government views AI, no doubt the government will introduce regulations. But I also think it’ll be used positively in cases like welfare delivery or digital infrastructure by the vast technocratic public-private ecosystem in India that has delivered Aadhar, India Stack, ONDC, etc… I’m not too worried about job loss. Rather tech-savvy Indians will integrate themselves into AI-related jobs that bloom.
It’ll be exciting to see how AI models, text, and images evolve as they increasingly get more and more Indian data. Shades of turmeric, Vedic translations, Shah Rukh Khan videos, Gurjara-Maru architecture, Lata Mangeshkar songs, etc… will all tinge it with an Indian tone.