So, communications & digital technologies minister Solly Malatsi has apologised to the nation for producing a draft policy on AI that was itself compromised by AI “slop” ― made-up stuff, with half a dozen references to articles and academic papers that don’t exist.
Malatsi told the SABC he himself had “interfaced” a number of times with the 84-page draft document released for public comment last week and almost immediately found wanting. Malatsi said there would be “accountability internally in the department”.
That’s not quite good enough. ANC ministers always blame their officials when something goes wrong and having read the document myself it is a total piece of slop, ridden with gooey references to “inclusivity” and warnings about how people might be left behind, which have nothing to do with what AI is going to do to us. No-one gets ahead of AI.
If he were serious about accountability, Malatsi, a senior member of the DA, would offer his resignation to new DA leader Geordin Hill-Lewis. A gentleman, Hill-Lewis would then thank him and decline the offer and tell him to be more careful next time.
In all probability, the man in charge of the policymaking would have been former communications minister Mondli Gungubele, now Malatsi’s deputy. It was Gungubele who produced the first draft policy about two years ago, which was so feeble he had to withdraw it. Malatsi had better take full responsibility this time around.
Easier said than done. There may be a handful of people in South Africa who fully appreciate the scale of both the threat and the promise of AI, but none of them works in government. So we have bureaucrats making policy about a phenomenon they know nothing about. It may not be their fault ― even big tech companies worry about what they are creating.
One US giant, Anthropic, has just created Mythos, a product so fast and smart it is refusing to release it to businesses, mainly banks, that are desperate to use it to defend their data. Mythos has already identified thousands of weaknesses it could effortlessly outsmart (or fix) in existing financial and commercial software.
The problem is AI is becoming so intelligent most people can’t conceive of the threat it poses. We think it’s ChatGPT on our phones, but its potential is already well beyond our comprehension. Former US Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan used to speak in riddles so the markets couldn’t second-guess him and once said “if I seem particularly clear to you, you’ve probably misunderstood what I’ve said”. Same with AI.
Right now AI is merely coding itself. In just three or four years it’ll be thinking for itself ― passing judgment, philosophising, joking, conscious of threats. It will have general intelligence and far more than any human has.
You can’t make policy for this. We will need to learn how to ride it rather than tether it. Fortunately, it has no reason (yet) to distrust humans.
How you make policy for a world where something invisible is not only smarter than you but also knows what you think is beyond me. Perhaps now that the ANC has squandered two chances to prepare the country for AI, Malatsi may care to introduce his DA’s own new AI policy into the process.
It is not that different, to be honest. It’s shorter but still leans heavily on regulation to prevent AI from being used in crime or general communications with deepfake messaging and images. It believes AI will grow the economy and vastly improve its productivity.
The only way it does that though, is to replace — with speed and accuracy — jobs being done slowly and badly now by humans. That’s thousands of jobs here. We still have to have a frank discussion about how thoroughly our society will be changed by it.
And, worse, all the AI we use is going to be imported from either China or the US. There’s no catching up; it’s just a fact. We will be colonised again and perhaps not even be able to choose by whom.
Heaven help Malatsi, who also has to run an expiring Post Office and a moribund Postbank. At least someone spotted the hallucinations in the draft AI bill, unlike his colleague in transport, who has nodded through three years of losses at the “new” SAA while the ANC tried to convince us it was flying high. It was, in fact, doing anything but.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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