India, Oct. 25 -- My cheque bounced at a Mumbai bank a few weeks ago. Not for lack of funds, but because the signature on file no longer matched the one scrawled on paper. The old signature was careful and deliberate. The new one was a blur. It was not forgery. It was an erosion of muscle memory. If a person cannot reliably reproduce their own mark anymore, what makes policymakers believe machines can reliably tell who or what created something?

And this brings us to India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's most recent proposal. It insists every piece of AI-generated content, whether video, image, or podcast, must carry a visible label covering at least ten per cent of its frame or duration. Nearly three out of four I...