P.V. Sindhu trolled for using AI to write a sycophantic piece on PM Modi

• PV Sindhu faces criticism after sharing her signed article praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with some social media users questioning its tone and alleging it was AI-generated

• Pangram AI reportedly flags the article as 100 per cent AI-generated, prompting accusations of ghostwriting, while The New Indian Express has not publicly explained how the article was published

• Modi reposts the article on his 76th birthday, praising Sindhu’s reflections on opportunities for a new generation; the controversy follows her recent comments about AI’s potential and risks

Comments have been scathing once badminton star and two-time Olympic medallist P.V. Sindhu posted on Thursday, 17 September her signed article published in The New Indian Express under the headline “Narendra Modi and the generation he set free”. While some wondered if she needed to be quite so uncritical and effusive, given the state of the economy and the country, others accused her of doing a cut-and-paste job.

“Straight from ChatGPT! Not that Modiji would decipher it any which ways!” read one comment while another stated, “unfortunately, Pangram says your article is 100 per cent AI-generated. It is like an athlete using steroids, and such athletes get banned. You are magnificent on the court dealing with a shuttlecock. So why this poppycock? Is a Rajya Sabha nomination so important for you? Sad.” Yet another comment read, “Indian ghost-writing industry is in existential crisis due to AI. Once, such celebs used ghost writers for these columns. Little bit employment was generated. Now just a few AI prompts & done.”

An appreciative Prime Minister Narendra Modi re-posted the article which appeared on his 76th birthday. “India has never lacked talent. What was often missing were opportunities and pathways to realise big dreams. In her insightful piece, P.V. Sindhu reflects on how the last 12 years have changed this, enabling a new generation of Indians not just to dream big, but to turn those dreams into reality. A must-read,” the prime minister tweeted.

Pangram AI is an AI-content detection platform that analyses text and estimates whether it was written by a human being, generated by AI, or created with AI assistance. The platform is widely used by schools, universities, publishers, businesses, and content moderation teams. Pangram AI uses machine learning and natural language processing models trained on large datasets of both human-written and AI-generated text. According to Pangram, its detector achieves around 99 per cent + accuracy and has been independently evaluated by researchers from the University of Chicago and the University of Maryland in US. It is regarded as one of the stronger AI-text detectors currently available. Pangram ruled that Sindhu’s article was ‘100 p.c’ AI-generated.

Several fans were shocked enough to voice that they have lost respect for the badminton player. “Not becoming of a sportsperson to use AI exclusively to shill for the Prime Minister and his political party. Shame on you, Sindhu. Always felt proud of your achievements and today you erased the respect I had for you.” Others too were sceptical of Indian influencers, celebrities and sportspersons crawling out of the woodwork to praise the prime minister while keeping silent on hostel collapse, mob lynching, police brutality, inflation and unemployment.

Did she have to write a puff piece, asked some fans. Others wondered what prompts otherwise apolitical sportspersons and film stars to shower such gushing praise on people in power. Some expressed doubts if the player’s name has been used by the ruling party’s IT cell to pull it off. The New Indian Express which is in a position to end the suspense and explain how it failed to detect a completely AI-generated article before publication, it has been silent so far.

In her effusive tribute Sindhu wrote, “For most of our history, the answer to a big dream in India was ‘you can’t’. Not because you were not good enough, but because the door didn’t exist. The quietest and largest achievement of Narendra Modi’s leadership is that the answer became ‘why not’…for decades, ambition in India ran into a wall of permissions. To do almost anything that mattered, you needed a licence, a clearance, a contact or the right family name", she wrote, but “PM Modi’s real insight was to look at that wall and see it for what it was. He put the shift in a simple line: government moving from ‘prohibited unless permitted’ to ‘permitted unless prohibited’."

Barely a week ago on 11 September, Sindhu had actually reflected on AI. “I’m no AI expert. I use it for training, recovery, learning and understanding my performance better. And then you read that people have tried to build rockets on the damn thing. Just crazy to think about the sheer power of this technology. The upside is extraordinary. The potential for misuse is terrifying.”

Her next signed piece, quipped a wag, could be on the misuse of AI.