Ramaphosa to take government, universities and business to Silicon Valley to learn how AI works

President Cyril Ramaphosa will lead a delegation of government representatives, academics, young people and business leaders to Silicon Valley in the United States after the elections, to look at how South Africa can use artificial intelligence and guard against its dangers.

He said so at the Black Wednesday commemoration lunch, where he told the room he had been immersing himself in the technology and wanted the delegation to engage the major industry players directly. As Sunday World reported on 19 October, Ramaphosa said the group would go “just to go and meet those big moguls of artificial intelligence, to get to understand exactly how it functions and how we can utilise it to our own benefit”.

The delegation, as he described it, is to include people from government, from universities, young people and business, and, in his words, “some of my comrades as well”. No date has been given beyond “after the elections”.

The country votes in local government elections on 4 November, and the president tied the AI question directly to that contest. He said the technology offers extraordinary possibilities for journalism, government and organisations, and that for South African newsrooms it could help analyse large volumes of information, identify patterns, translate content into different languages and make information more accessible.

In a country with 12 official languages, that last point is not a small one. Access to information across language communities is a live question for public communication, for courts and for clinics, and translation capacity is one of the places where AI tools are already being tried.

Ramaphosa balanced the promise against the risk in the same speech. He warned that the same tools can manufacture convincing but false content, and that this could threaten public trust and democratic processes, with particular force in the run-up to a vote.

He illustrated it with a photograph that circulated showing him lying in a hospital ward next to Deputy President Paul Mashatile. Ramaphosa said he had never been hospitalised, although Mashatile had been incapacitated by a medical condition and has since returned home. “And they put us in a hospital ward, lying next to each other, and many people believed it, and many concluded there is no leadership in South Africa,” he said.

That is the practical problem in plain terms. A fabricated image can travel across social media before journalists have had the chance to check it, and by the time the record is set the impression has already been formed. Ramaphosa put it this way: “A fabricated reporting, a recording rather, can spread across social media before journalists have had an opportunity to check it and establish it as truth.”

He argued that disinformation can undermine confidence in democratic institutions, inflame divisions and distort the choices voters make, and that the growing sophistication of the tools makes credible, independent and professional journalism more essential rather than less. “Technology may change how information is produced and distributed, but it does not diminish the importance of truth, of accuracy, fairness and accountability,” he said.

The president also condemned the harassment and intimidation of journalists, particularly women who face threats and abuse on digital platforms, and said political leaders have a responsibility to speak out against it unequivocally, including when the people responsible claim to support their own organisations. “No journalist should ever have to fear for their safety because they are doing their job,” he said.

What the trip produces, and whether it comes back as anything more than a report, is the open question. The stated aim is to understand how the technology works and how the country can use it. Whether that translates into skills, procurement, regulation or support for local firms and newsrooms is not yet on the record.