The chaos at the India AI Impact Summit in Delhi and a Chinese robodog overshadowing the government’s push to “Make in India” has inspired cartoonists’ funny bone and humorous takes on the situation.

The five-day summit, which was being promoted as the first major gathering on artificial intelligence in the Global South, was criticised by the Opposition as a “disorganised PR spectacle”.

The “mismanagement” during its opening session on Monday was evident enough for the Union government to apologise for the problems participants had faced.

On Wednesday, the Greater Noida-based Galgotias University was asked to vacate its stall after social-media users pointed out that a robotic dog that a faculty member claimed had been developed at the institution was actually a commercially available Chinese product.

Cartoonist Alok pointed to the absurdity of the situation in an imaginary conversation between the Chinese robot and the lion logo of the Make in India campaign that aimed at transforming the country into a global design and manufacturing hub.

Social media users said that the university’s claim that it had never said that it had built the robot was “incorrect and misleading”. They pointed out that the institute had named the off-the-shelf product “Orion” and had claimed during an interview to DD News that it had been “developed by the Centre of Excellence at the Galgotias University”.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, which has organised the artificial intelligence event, had shared the DD News interview about the robot on social media.

The university issued an apology for the “confusion created” at the summit, saying that its representative at the exhibition was ill-informed. There was “no institutional intent to misrepresent this innovation”, the institute claimed.

Mali’s cartoon played with the same elements that Alok had.

The controversy also provided grist for the mills of other cartoonists.

Sandeep Adhwaryu bemoaned the absence of originality exemplified by the controversy about the robotic dog, linking it to the incarceration of Ladakh-based innovator and educator Sonam Wangchuk.

Wangchuk has been in detention under the National Security Act since September after protests in Leh demanding statehood for Ladakh and its inclusion in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution.

Here are some other cartoons that sent up the AI event.

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