With the recent AI policy scandal in the Department of Digital Communications and Technology, South Africa should ask whether it needs a restrictive artificial intelligence policy framework in the first place. Emulating Europe’s regulatory straitjacket would stifle our low-growth economy and impose unaffordable compliance burdens on start-ups. America’s light-touch approach proves the better path.
Communications minister Solly Malatsi recently found himself in hot water. His department released a draft National Artificial Intelligence Policy Framework, only to withdraw it after it emerged that the document was riddled with fictitious references – classic artificial intelligence “hallucinations”. A policy meant to govern artificial intelligence (AI) had itself been undermined by the very technology it sought to tame.
Malatsi rightly pulled the document, but the episode raises a key question: Why does South Africa need an AI policy at all?
Read the full article in the Daily Friend.