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By:

Shiv Sethi

10 January 2026 at 8:13:11 pm

‘Deepfakes Are Crossing Serious Ethical Lines’

Serbjeet Sidhu is an engineer by education, a management consultant by profession and a writer by passion. His experience across international organisations, diverse cultures and relationships has shaped a broad, practical understanding of people. He has a natural knack for working with incomplete or unstructured information, ambiguity and competing choices, and hence sees writing as a natural extension of his consulting instinct. Here are the excerpts of his interaction with Shiv Sethi. You...

‘Deepfakes Are Crossing Serious Ethical Lines’

Serbjeet Sidhu is an engineer by education, a management consultant by profession and a writer by passion. His experience across international organisations, diverse cultures and relationships has shaped a broad, practical understanding of people. He has a natural knack for working with incomplete or unstructured information, ambiguity and competing choices, and hence sees writing as a natural extension of his consulting instinct. Here are the excerpts of his interaction with Shiv Sethi. You come from an engineering and consulting background. What brought you into writing? For me, the transition is natural. A consultant must observe, communicate, cut through clutter and make sense of situations where the full picture is rarely available. Engineering gave me a practical, logical outlook; consulting taught me to question, structure and communicate. Writing is an extension of that. The audience may be different, but the principle is the same: understand what is happening, view it from different angles and communicate it clearly. Your books range from relationships to AI, leadership and satire. Are they not disconnected in theme? Certainly not. I never decide that today I will write fiction, satire or business. An idea usually begins with something I observe in everyday life or work. Even my fiction is rarely fiction at the root; the seed is real. Only One grew from thoughts I first had while preparing for my NDA interview, where choices and collateral consequences were part of the mindset. Patong Can Wait is satire, but it comes from observing real social behaviour. I write what feels worth expressing, not what is trending. Choices and moral ambiguity appear repeatedly in your work. Why do they interest you so much? It is probably the management consultant in me; choices are my food for thought. In life, there is often no single correct choice. Choices are rarely as simple as right versus wrong. They are more often between responsibilities, loyalties, people, outcomes or circumstances, each carrying consequences. This is especially interesting to me when viewed through the lens of change enablement. AI features prominently in your recent work. What worries you most about its impact? Three things. First, AI hype can make it look like a one-stop route to a high-paying job, when it is fundamentally an enabling tool. Second, overdependence may weaken problem-solving, judgement, ethics and other core skills. Third, deepfakes are already crossing serious ethical lines and are often defended as humour even when they put false words or actions onto real people. My fear is not that AI becomes intelligent; my fear is that AI may never become ethical. We should not outsource thinking simply because an answer is always available. What should young people understand about careers in the AI era? Never confuse mastery of a tool with mastery of a profession. Build a strong foundation first - engineering, finance, marketing, or whatever your field - and then use AI to become better at it. Human judgement, communication, relationships, curiosity and ethics still matter. You have written about leadership and what has gone wrong in modern journalism. Do you see a common thread? Certainly. The common thread is what organisations say they value and what they actually reward. If a company says it values trust and people development but rewards only the bottom line, behaviour will follow the bottom line. The same applies to media. If promotions are driven mainly by clicks, TRPs and outrage, ethics take a back seat. I see both as performance-management problems. Values cannot live only on posters; they must appear in how performance is measured and rewarded. Walking the talk is not a slogan; it is a system. Do you write to give readers answers, or to make them question their own choices? I cannot answer on the reader's behalf. I write to make people think and discover their own answers. This comes from my consulting instinct: I do not tell a client, 'This is your answer.' I lay out options, consequences and trade-offs, and the client decides. With readers, I do something similar. I am a facilitator: I show different ways of looking at something and let readers discover their own answers. What would you like readers to remember about you after reading your work? I would like to leave a mark where, in some way, I remain Gone and Ungone. Gone because, like everyone else, one day I will no longer be here. Ungone because my words may remain. I write to express what I have seen, what I believe and what I think might help someone facing a situation I once faced. Books stay. If something I have written makes someone think, question or see a situation differently years from now, that is enough for me.

China’s Deep Seeking Blue Whale

Writer: Priya Samant
Priya Samant
Feb 8, 2025
3 min read

Updated: Feb 10, 2025

Deep Seeking

China’s DeepSeek headlines over the past week did not let me broach any topic other than Chinese influence operations and cyber warfare. And so here I am, writing a sequel to my previous one!


The launch of DeepSeek by China shocked the entire tech world. For years, U.S. export restrictions had kept essential AI Chips out of China’s grasp, which many believed would hinder China’s digital progress. Furthermore, China’s own censorship policy, the Great Firewall, was also considered impeding its pursuit of AI supremacy. However, DeepSeek’s debut showcases China’s resilience and determination to assert its place in the global AI arena.


The Chinese fund manager garnered significant acclaim for developing an affordable yet highly effective AI, but many industry experts rebut his low-cost claim, contending that he made a billion-dollar investment in hardware and had procured AI Chips way ahead of US restrictions or might have made a black market purchase! Regardless of the DeepSeek investment details, the achievement of his 1-year-old Chinese company certainly raised doubts about the validity of years of US research and the necessity of massive investments in AI. As a result, this Chinese “six million dollar man” shook US tech giants and wiped off $1 trillion of their market value in a single day. Though the market revived the next day, his smarter and cheaper AI has undoubtedly intensified the global competition.


Although China remains the state-run world factory churning out cheap lots for Western brands, over the past decade, it has significantly strengthened its presence in the global digital infrastructure through its advanced hardware, software, and innovative technologies, thereby emerging as “wǎngluò qiángguó,” the “cyber superpower” as envisioned by President Xi Jinping. The effectiveness of China’s cyber policy is evident in the fact that, despite security concerns, its AI software, like all previous Chinese applications, surpassed America’s well-known apps by securing the number one spot on Apple’s App download chart.


The logo of this low-cost Chinese challenger, a fat blue whale, may seem friendly, symbolising an effortless deep dive into the world of AI. A wise gaze may reveal, perhaps, China’s secret desire! A blue whale into the sea of data, with an open mouth indicating a large appetite for information, a huge head housing a large analytical brain and a wide open eye representing China’s “Sharp Eye,” “the Xueliang Project” aiming 100 per cent surveillance.


China is utilising several apps, devices and its digital infrastructure to gather volumes of user data, including location history, fitness data, video surveillance, e-commerce transactions, travel bookings and sensitive personal details like PII, to seek deep insights and gain political, strategic or military leverage. Under the “Sharp Eyes Project,” China has developed a surveillance technology that integrates large amounts of data to monitor criminals and anticipate potential crimes and protests within the country! Given China’s progress in data harvesting and fusion techniques, its AI may prove to be a highly effective decision-making tool in every sphere of life, including education, healthcare, finance, travel and at all the levels of the society, from individual to the states. Nevertheless, considering the Chinese biases, propaganda motives and influence operations, one cannot rule out the risk of distorted output and data breach from its AI.


And so, countries like Italy, Taiwan, the United States and India have swiftly recognized the security risks associated with Chinese AI technologies and have prohibited government officials from using them to protect national interests. Conversely, several developing countries are turning to China’s Digital Silk Road initiative to meet their domestic digital requirements, ultimately enabling Chinese AI to exert significant influence and reshape many geopolitical equations! To effectively navigate this complex reality, strong international cooperation is essential, which can develop a reliable AI tool and a framework that maximizes the potential of AI by ensuring greater data access and privacy, paving the way for future innovations and positive change.


(The author is a foreign affairs expert. Views personal.)

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