Over the last year, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has risen from a topic that was the preserve of the tech field to arguably the biggest tech trend.
Reporting in its annual Global Survey, McKinsey says more than a third of the C-Suite executives it surveyed are using AI in at least one business function.
As computer systems are developed to get the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, AI has been deployed in various industries, and creative fields are no exception.
Keziah Mumbi, a content creator, model and software engineer describes her relationship with AI as “frightening and exciting.”
She uses AI to develop concepts and to create models as she works.
“It is frankly very complicated, but I am trying to adapt it to my work,” she says.
Leonard Dzoga, a copywriter at Oxygene MCL, reckons that “While AI is both quite interesting and also a bit scary especially in copywriting, there is a lot of learning that can be got from AI and that AI will also benefit from a human hand.”
Through machine learning and analysis of huge data sets, generative AI which is the driver of tools like ChatGPT and Dall-E, gives the appearance of being able to carry out creative tasks such as writing advertising copy, painting a picture or designing artwork.
There is a raging debate on whether the AI is creative or is merely mirroring the data that has been fed into it. Currently machines are learning from humans, but will it reach a point where machines get to be even smarter than humans or even reason differently from how humans do?
Shem Obara, a photographer and videographer, has already incorporated generative AI tools like Midjourney and Runaway into his bag of tricks, to great effect. He however laments the fact that in Kenya, there is a language barrier as well as hiccups emerging from early adoption.
“For an AI model to be able to work effectively, it needs to be trained using a vast amount of data. You may find someone living in Kenya and they speak only Swahili, for example, this is a language AI has not been trained in. Or even the fact that there are not enough images of African people or African setting fed into AI to enable it to generate such content when prompted,” explains Obara.
The increasing use of AI has raised concerns about the future of the job market. In March this year, Goldman Sachs released a report stating that AI could replace 300 million full-time jobs worldwide, affecting almost 20 per cent of the global workforce.
Even as AI unfolds in Kenya and AI gets more mainstream, there are many issues that Kenyan creatives need to navigate.
There is the issue of cheating where one presents work created from AI as your own work, there are issues of complacency where creatives end up using AI as a crutch instead of being creative themselves. There is also the minefield of ethics and copyright infringement and also just being able to keep up with AI models which keep changing and shifting daily.
These issues and more are at the heart of this edition of the Safaricom Newsroom podcast.
You can watch or listen to the conversation below.
