Security, ethics and opportunity: AI in South Africa
By Jacques du Bruyn
Don’t panic – AI isn’t coming for your job. What it is doing is delivering new opportunities, creating new jobs and making work simpler for millions of people.
Like the quote from Joanna Maciejewska, about wanting AI to do the laundry and dishes so she could work on art, rather than having it create art and writing so she could do the housework, and which has been interpreted in many ways, the opportunity can work both ways.
Take the Gap
You could work hard to understand how AI operates and get to the front of the Prompt Engineer queue, capitalising on an opportunity to be the person who is able to prompt AI to deliver a specific result, for example, an image, music, video or research, that a client needs. You could also use AI to deliver the basis of some work to allow you more time, in an increasingly deadline-centric world, to engage with the results to deliver more meaningful and insightful work. That means we need to separate opportunities that AI can deliver – whether it’s new opportunities or an evolution of work – but the reality is that AI isn’t going anywhere. It’s more a case of “adapt and thrive” than “adapt or die”.
In the marketing space, upskilling in AI is an essential. Like any new tool that’s come along in the past two decades, we need to understand what opportunities it offers and how we can best use it to our advantage. It means learning a new skillset. Whether it’s discovering how AI can help you roll out advertising banners faster or quickly edit an image to make it better suited to a campaign, it’s the application of a new tool to your work.
Providing Opportunities
Or you could choose not to evolve with AI and get left behind when someone who has evolved with AI is able to deliver work more quickly and thoughtfully than you. Adopting AI in the marketing space doesn’t mean a race to the bottom in pricing or relying on pre-generated ideas. Rather, it opens opportunities to do better work if you use it properly. Use it to take the “grunt work” off your plate so you can be more creative and effective.
What we do need to watch out for is broadening the avast digital divide. Learning about AI requires access to online platforms, which needs computers, smartphones or tablets, which require internet connectivity. Only by providing access to the necessary facilities can we upskill people on the latest tools – which is essential in transforming jobs and opening new opportunities.
According to the National Treasury, the South African middle class (individuals earning R30 000 to 40 000 a month) has grown by 12% year-on-year for the past 4 years. The number of high net worth individuals – those earning R80 000 and upwards a month – has grown by 20% over the same period.
In comparison, the number of taxpayers earning R10 000 or less a month hasn’t grown. That means that the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening and that the middle class – those with access to desk jobs – are going to become exponentially more employable if they adapt to AI while those at the bottom end of the market will be left further behind.
Bridging the divide
The government and the private sector must partner to help ensure that people don’t get left behind. South Africa has an amazing opportunity to grow the personal and collective economy by outsourcing labour to the rest of the world. We are well-positioned in terms of time zones, most of our population speaks English and our cost of labour is low, especially against the world’s big currencies, which all combine to produce a brilliant opportunity, but we need to make sure people have the necessary skills. An understanding and mastery of AI tools is one of them.
One of the most important skills anyone using AI needs to learn is understanding ethics and data privacy. AI learns from the information it has access to. It’s essential to understand that the data being used as input to help AI perform tasks for us isn’t sensitive, private or under NDA (non disclosure agreement).
There also needs to be an understanding that AI won’t be used to create disinformation. It can devise responses based only on what it knows, often with hilariously bad results, so, a degree of critical thinking is required in assessing outputs and understanding their context. Establishing ethical practices in AI could result in the establishment of a whole new industry, with a whole new tranche of jobs.
Looking at how fast AL engines have evolved in the past two years makes it difficult to make predictions for the next 10. Just what kind of industries it will affect and the jobs that it will influence is hard to qualify. The important thing to do is adapt. For that, we need to bridge the divide in South Africa to give people a fighting chance to capitalise on the amazing opportunity access to AI tools presents – when we understand and can harness the power of AI to help make us better, not obsolete.
Jacques du Bruyn is the managing director at Flume Digital Marketing.
BUSINESS REPORT