The controversy involving Galgotias College showcasing a Chinese language-manufactured robotic canine as its personal product on February 17 on the India AI Affect Summit underway in Delhi calls to thoughts how “greenwashing” by big companies has been expanded to the present hype, synthetic intelligence.
A few years in the past, multinational corporations found that sustainability was a buzzword, whilst they had been destroying forests, polluting rivers and seas, and their executives had been flying in to work on non-public jets. However they needed to inform their prospects, in addition to regulators and society at massive, that they cared in regards to the surroundings.
So companies started selling paper straws and material luggage. They purchased carbon credit and put in some photo voltaic amenities on their premises. They led tree-planting drives in cities whereas stripping massive swathes of the Amazon and Sumatran forests. This follow is now referred to as “greenwashing,” the place corporations exaggerate their commitments to sustainability and the surroundings.
Now, corporations have found a brand new and analogous follow: AI-washing. Right here, they exaggerate synthetic intelligence capabilities, typically at nice price to their prospects, traders and even society.
Delhi: Professor of Galgotias College, Neha Singh says, “….Our college aligns with the Prime Minister’s imaginative and prescient and mission. We’re working in the direction of a Aatmanirbhar Bharat…” pic.twitter.com/a2tlVNYSvP
— Mohammed Zubair (@zoo_bear) February 18, 2026
AI in a ‘field’
About 250 years in the past, a Hungarian inventor named Wolfgang Von Klempen claimed to have invented a chess-playing automaton. He known as it the Mechanical Turk. It may play chess and beat even the very best gamers. Individuals had been surprised by what appeared like the primary occasion of synthetic intelligence. However the Mechanical Turk was a hoax. The field hid a chess participant inside who was making all of the strikes.
There are a lot of cases of the Mechanical Turk within the twenty first century.
Way back to 2016, viral movies of Amazon’s Go shops took social media by storm. A buyer may stroll into an unmanned retailer, choose up stuff and stroll out – an AI algorithm would observe the shopper and their purchases, billing their Amazon account mechanically.
However in 2024, it was discovered that the Go Shops had been truly being monitored by call-centre staff in India. In 2024, an Amazon spokesperson advised Enterprise Insider that the workforce in India “helps practice the mannequin” and that associates “validate a small minority of procuring visits”.
Equally, everybody’s favorite tech guru Elon Musk showcased his superb autonomous robots – Tesla’s Optimus – on the We Robotic occasion 2024. The robots had been later revealed to be remote-controlled by people.
The case of a high-profile startup known as Engineer.ai tells the identical story. The founders promised to leverage the ability of AI to assist customers construct web sites with none coding information. In 2019, it was discovered that builders in India had been doing the job, not AI.
Just a few years later, Engineer.ai rebranded itself as Builder.ai, attracted much more hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in funding, this time claiming it might use AI to hurry up app growth. The corporate filed for chapter in late 2024.
The Go Retailer and Builder.ai fiascos had been pulled off with low-paid staff primarily based in India.
India aspires to be a part of the worldwide AI revolution, however as an alternative are Indians being relegated to the darkish back-alleys of the ecosystem?
AI India
AI is a serious buzzword in India proper now.
State governments and entrepreneurs are saying AI initiatives by the dozen. AI universities are promising to vary the face of upper training. AI-powered cities promise to finish issues of homelessness, segregation and sprawl. There’s AI in catastrophe administration, tourism and public transport.
Nearly each Indian state has unveiled bold AI roadmaps and signed memorandums of understanding with main organisations and philanthropic trusts. The press releases brim with buzzwords and jargon, however many claims really feel like puffery – for now.
Then there have additionally been the acquainted problematic themes and scientifically-questionable use-cases of synthetic intelligence. The Maharashtra authorities in January claimed that it’s going to use AI to detect “unlawful” immigrants from Bangladesh. Graduates of India’s finest technical faculties are creating AI-powered astrology apps for the superstitious, at valuations operating into crores of rupees.
Youngsters are turning to AI chat bots for psychological assist and counselling, typically with disastrous penalties. Attorneys are utilizing generative AI instruments to organize briefs, citing faux instances.
Fairly than innovation, AI has efficiently enabled fraudulent endeavours.
AI-generated faux invoices are pretty much as good as real ones – the know-how has helped impact a paradigm shift in company reimbursement fraud. Some enterprising Indians at the moment are utilizing AI-generated photographs of flies and bugs in meals to get free meals from meals supply platforms.
AI-generated analysis papers of questionable high quality are inundating the peer overview groups of educational journals, whereas faculty lecturers and faculty professors are grading AI-generated assignments submitted by college students. Deep-fake movies utilizing AI have taken faux information to a complete new stage.
In the meantime, severe AI researchers and builders are toiling away doing unglamorous math on chalk boards, writing blocks of code on their laptops, and presenting their area of interest analysis in educational conferences and boring educational journals.
When AI-washers and their gimmicks take over the narrative, they compete with real gamers for funds, assets and a spotlight. As dancing robotic canines take over the general public creativeness, priorities shift as effectively.
To the layperson and infrequently the policymaker and politician, there may be little distinction between the intense AI stakeholder and the blowhard. The 2 share the identical boards and the identical media retailers, and their opinions are sometimes juxtaposed alongside each other.
AI-washing is just not uniquely an Indian phenomenon. However similar to India’s area scientists and IT service suppliers, there may be much more to show than western counterparts, merely to stake our declare to legitimacy. Perhaps it’s time for some deep introspection and to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Prithwiraj Mukherjee is Affiliate Professor of Advertising and marketing on the Amrut Mody Faculty of Administration, Ahmedabad College. Opinions expressed are his personal, and don’t mirror these of his employer.
