“AI will average things out”: MIB secretary Sanjay Jaju’s sharp message to creators

At the AI Impact Summit, Shradha Sharma, founder and CEO of YourStory, spoke to Sanjay Jaju, Secretary of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB), about what he called India’s emerging “AI moment” — and why media and entertainment could be one of the first sectors to feel the full impact.

Jaju said the MIB pavilion at the summit was designed to feel industry-led, not like a conventional government department. The aim, he explained, was to showcase how AI is beginning to reshape the media and entertainment stack — from animation and visual effects to comics and gaming — with significant productivity gains on the horizon.

He pointed to close to 50 startups being showcased in the pavilion and noted that many are coming from beyond the usual metro startup clusters. In his view, this widening geography of innovation is part of what makes the moment notable — products built in smaller cities are increasingly finding use cases and audiences outside India too.

When asked what the government is doing to encourage this wave, Jaju linked the momentum to a sustained push toward building a creator economy. He referenced the World Audio Visual and Entertainment Summit (WAVES), which he described as a major convening platform that connected creators and countries at scale. He said WAVES laid the groundwork for follow-on efforts such as the Creators’ Corner and the WAVEX incubation programme.

Jaju said startups in the ecosystem span diverse segments — including holograms, gaming, translation tools, and AI-led filmmaking — and argued that “creative technology” is becoming the new baseline, where creation is no longer just art, but art plus tools.

He also made the case that AI can democratise creative entrepreneurship by lowering barriers that once required big studios, large budgets, and long production cycles. Stories, he suggested, can increasingly be told at a fraction of the cost — unlocking economic and employment upside for the sector.

At the same time, he flagged the risks: synthetic content, deepfakes, and misinformation that can spread extremely fast, often before harm can be contained. His view was that the approach has to be two-sided — embrace the upside, but build guardrails and countermeasures for the downside, especially in a domain where credibility is central.

His sharpest message to creators and founders: AI will “average things out.” If you’re good, it will make you better. If you’re bad, it will make you worse. Tools, he said, can accelerate production — but original storytelling still depends on human ingenuity.