The message that Africa’s role in artificial intelligence is an investment agenda reverberated across fireside chats, workshop presentations and exhibits at the recent “AI Everything Kenya” conference with the tagline “Home to the Most Innovative AI, Cybersecurity & Tech Showcases in Africa.” The event attracted the type of participants it was designed for: venture capitalists, government delegates, and technology innovators. Civil society actors were far fewer. Concerns about digital rights, inclusion, equality, and ethics were expressed only occasionally.

Numerous conversations regarding AI are taking place, but seemingly with little, if any, convergence across them. One constellation of discussions revolves around trade, innovation, and investment. Another debates digital justice and human rights on the internet. AI is applied for noble purposes as much as for nefarious ones. There are drones that map crop disease, small language models that cater to African communities, and generative AI trained on African publications. At the same time, AI is used in lethal autonomous weapons and for domestic mass surveillance.

AI Everything Kenya was a masterclass on the technical aspects of AI: how to prepare to raise a financing round, how to integrate AI into security strategies, how to build AI-ready use cases aligned with International Telecommunications Union (ITU) standards in various domains. With the exception of a handful of sessions, the conference lost an opportunity to grapple with issues of rights, opportunities, and freedoms. “What does it mean to safeguard our humanity?” Pope Leo asks in his recent encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas: “The risk extends beyond misuse. […] The quality of a civilization is measured not by the power of its means, but by the care it is able to offer, by its ability to recognize the other as a face not merely as a function […]. Technology can also support this mutual care between people, for example, by providing tools that help us anticipate and organize things, without undermining human freedom and judgment.”

In The Great Transformation, political economist Karl Polanyi argues that the idea of a market disembedded from society was a utopia and as such, could not exist without annihilating the human and natural substance of society. A protective counter movement would emerge to prevent disaster and create stability. Extending Polanyi’s critique of market fundamentalism to the AI revolution, it could be argued that the current over-enthusiasm about AI is bound to create an AI ecosystem that is disembedded from the social. Pockets of dissent rise, but the free market persists despite the problems it has brought on.

Likewise with the AI revolution, the momentum is at an all-time high and is likely to be amplified despite the concerns that have been raised, including displacement of human labour, environmental costs, algorithmic bias, and AI-enabled violence against women and girls. As long as the siloed conversations continue, with industry in its corner and conscientious civil society in another, the risks to society and community will continue into the distant future.

Image generated by WACC using Canva Magic Studio

The plot could easily have been from a Netflix dystopian thriller.

“The Russian Guy” approaches ordinary women and girls leading ordinary lives, one walking her child to school, another stocking supermarket shelves, and a young girl walking by.

“Hello. What’s your name? You look beautiful. Come with me.”

He has sex with them in his rental apartment. The entire encounter is captured on video through his Ray-Ban META smart glasses. He posts the videos on his private Telegram account and porn sites for paying followers, while shorter clips have gone viral on TikTok and Instagram. Rumors swirl that he is HIV positive. Evidence indicates that hundreds of women and young girls across Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa have fallen prey.

The spectrum of technology-facilitated gender-based violence has fanned out yet again into an even more grotesque form.

First, it was humans operating in the dark web. As the range of tech tools expanded, so did new ideas emerge on how to amplify violations against women and girls. Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, enabled image-editing to create non-consensual sexualized images of women. With “the Russian Guy,” otherwise known as “Yaytseslav,” AI-powered wearables in the form of eyewear with hidden cameras have raised the stakes. His prey were unaware that the blinking light at the corner of the frames was a recording camera paired to a smartphone.

The gender AI divide – inequalities between women and men related to access, use, development, and representation in AI technologies – one that is wider for less tech-savvy women, implies that the room for AI-amplified violations can only expand.

Yaytseslav’s case is also a cautionary tale on AI ethics and regulation. Despite public outrage in Ghana and Kenya and calls for his arrest, he remains active, posting content on social media.

The Cyber Security Authority in Ghana invoked Section 67 of the Cybersecurity Act, which criminalizes the non-consensual recording, publication, or distribution of intimate images or videos. By then, he had travelled to Kenya, where the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act 2018 provides similar grounds.

Legislation is of little value, however, when perpetrators can move freely between jurisdictions. The scale of Yaytseslav’s actions might have been reduced if comprehensive, regional and/or international AI regulatory frameworks had been in place to serve as a deterrent.

That the events are presently unfolding in the Silicon Savannah in Kenya, a country that is one of Africa’s frontier tech nations and one of the region’s top AI policymakers, is alarming.

Regulation must cover AI-amplified gendered violence, exclusion, exploitation and misogyny, beyond the often-touted economic benefits. Rather than a patchwork of dispersed national laws, standards must be harmonized across the region. They must be enforced by a powerful regulator able to stand up to the Global North’s big tech firms on all facets of technology.

Photo: Ground Pictures and People Images composition

Meanwhile in New Zealand, MP Laura McClure proposed a bill to expand existing laws and criminalize the creation and sharing of non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes. To support her proposal, she held up to her parliamentary colleagues an A3-size AI-generated nude image of herself created in less than five minutes on technology found through a simple Google search.

It emerges that some U.S. lawmakers who voted for the bill had not read the fine print.  Their hands are now tied for the next decade.

What to do about AI governance, what dimensions to regulate and how far, seem not to be clear to policy makers. Even while AI is the new frontier for criminal behaviour, it appears some legislators are still working out what the boundaries of digital communication should be.

Kenya is a case in point. This week, the government charged a software developer with “cybercrime” for creating a website to explain a controversial proposed finance bill in easy-to-understand language.

Meanwhile, in Brussels, legislators made important strides with the European Union’s AI Act, arguably the most comprehensively thought-out one so far. It identifies risk, outrightly bans some AI practices, demands transparency, and defines penalties for non-compliance, with some exemptions.

The eclectic nature of the global AI regulatory environment results in loopholes that can be easily exploited. Further, that regulation moves at the speed of bureaucracy while AI evolves at the speed of thought is an added complication.  

The stakes couldn’t be higher in this global experiment on who gets to control the future. Will it be governments protecting netizens or corporations chasing power and profit?

Photo: Shutterstock AI

Anxieties about a takeover of humanity by automation, machines, and technology are not new. In the Western world, the fears date back to the 1800s when textile automation fueled protests against job loss. Disquiet about AI first emerged three quarters of a century ago when pioneers warned of its potential to mimic and replace human labour.  Fears of imminent job loss bubbled to the surface, particularly in sectors characterized by repetitive tasks.

With the digital revolution, the fears have gone mainstream and global. Today, it is not only manual jobs that are replaceable but also those requiring empathy and cognitive capacities – such as mental health therapy and scientific research. The informal sector employing the majority of global south populations is at risk as some jobs become formalized, earnings are eroded, and power is concentrated in platforms and governments.

Global big tech founders have weighed in on AI’s impact on jobs, society, and the future of innovation. Humans will no longer be needed for most things because AI will readily perform tasks requiring specialized human skills (Bill Gates). Probably none of us will have a job (Elon Musk). Software engineers will do much more for a while and then at some point, fewer will be needed (OpenAI’s Sam Altman).

AI displacement of human labour brings a risk of deepening power and economic inequalities across and within nations. Research on the platform economy or “gig work” finds an algorithmic allocation of jobs that exacerbates gender inequalities.

Such risks are not immediately evident to those at the forefront of AI regulation, whose attention is often focused on ethics. To this point, a spokesperson from the EU at a side event at the recent UN Commission on the Status of Women admits that the gender dimensions were overlooked in the protracted process to regulate online work.

History suggests that societal adaptation naturally follows technological advancement. Present-day AI however seems to be more threatening due the sheer rapidity of change. Will there come a time when AI will follow its own distinctive logic unconstrained by human and societal values? On this point, the jury is still out.

Image: Shutterstock AI