‘Bollywood vs Bangalore’: L. Badri Narayanan Flags Looming Clash Between AI and Creators

At the India Law, AI and Tech Summit 2025 held on 29 November, L Badri Narayanan, Executive Partner at Lakshmikumaran and Sridharan Attorneys, delivered one of the strongest interventions of the event. Speaking in the session titled “From IP to Intangibles: Protecting Innovation in an AI Driven, Software Led Economy”, he framed India’s AI future as a pivotal choice. He asked whether the country will prioritise its creator economy or accelerate rapid AI adoption.

Narayanan opened with a direct question: “Is India going to adopt AI or is it going to protect creators.” He noted that a collision between artificial intelligence systems and traditional creative industries is now unavoidable. As generative AI expands its reach at high speed, he warned that policymakers will soon have to decide whether to back human creators or push for AI powered innovation across sectors.

“AI is real, our IP structure does not lend itself to AI, our policymakers have the toughest decision ahead. They must decide whom they are going to protect. Our filmmakers or AI. So it is going to be between Bollywood and Bangalore. That is the real fight that is going to be there in our country,” he said.

The metaphor captured a deep anxiety across the global creative sector. AI models trained on vast datasets of human made art, music, literature and cinema already challenge long standing copyright principles. In India, where copyright laws were drafted for a physical world and later updated for digital use, Narayanan argued that regulators are not prepared for the rapid pace of AI innovation.

He placed this dilemma in context with the scale of investment worldwide. The ongoing global investment in AI, he noted, is close to 1 percent of the GDP of the United States. This translates to nearly 3 trillion dollars in research, engineering, compute infrastructure and commercial deployment. For India, the question is not whether AI will transform the economy. The real question is how quickly and how responsibly the ecosystem will respond.

Narayanan also warned against assuming that technological upgrades automatically improve life. “Whenever we have added software to our workflows in the past, it has not necessarily improved our lives. If anything, it has often made them worse,” he observed. He added that productivity gains from AI deployment still do not match the level of investment being poured into the sector. This is partly because AI is still at a very early stage. In his words, it is “more an infant than an adult or a teenager.”

He described AI’s current phase as one of constant and exciting feedback. “Every day there is some movement. You put something into AI and you get an immediate result and researchers feel real progress,” he said. However, he warned that this rapid feedback phase will eventually slow down. After that stage, the real challenges will emerge. “When the child becomes a teenager and then an adult, that is when AI will face its biggest challenges.”

His remarks highlighted a larger policy dilemma. India must find a way to modernise its intellectual property framework, safeguard creative labour and still remain competitive in a world that is rapidly reorganising itself around artificial intelligence.