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editorial
KOFI AGAWU
African Art Music and the Challenge of Postcolonial Composition
PAUL ZILUNGISELE TEMBE
China’s Effective Anti-Corruption Campaign
DILIP M. MENON
Changing Theory: Thinking Concepts from the Global South
BEN WATSON
Talking about music
Theme AI in Africa
blk banaana
An (Other) Intelligence
VULANE MTHEMBU
Umshini Uyakhuluma (The Machine Speaks) – Africa and the AI Revolution: Exploring the Rapid Development of Artificial Intelligence on the Continent.
OLORI LOLADE SIYONBOLA
A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence in Africa
CHRIS EMEZUE & IYANUOLUWA SHODE
AI and African Languages: Empowering Cultures and Communities
NOLAN OSWALD DENNIS
Toward Misrecognition. | Project notes for a haunting-ting
SLINDILE MTHEMBU
AI and documenting black women's lived experiences: Creating future awareness through AI-generated sonics and interpretive movement for the future of freeing suffering caused on black bodies.
ALEXANDRA STANG
Artificially Correct? How to combat bias and inequality in language use with AI
BAKARY DIARRASSOUBA
Bambara: The Jeli (Griot) Project
ROY BLUMENTHAL
Artificial Intelligence and the Arcane Art of the Prompt
AI GENERATED
"AI on Artificial Intelligence in Africa" and "Exploring its impact on Art and Creativity"
JULIA SCHNEIDER
AI in a biased world
MBANGISO MABASO
Bana Ba Dinaledi: Telling African Stories using Generative AI Art.
ALEX TSADO & BETTY WAIREGI
African AI today
BOBBY SHABANGU
Using Artificial Intelligence to expand coverage of African content on Wikipedia
DARRYL ACCONE
Welcome to The End of Beauty: AI Rips the Soul Out of Chess
VULANE MTHEMBU & ChatGPT
Hello ChatGPT - A conversation with OpenAI's Assistant
DIMITRI VOUDOURIS
Evolution of Sιήκ
STEFANIE KASTNER
Beyond the fact that most robots are white: Challenges of AI in Africa
MARTIJN PANTLIN
Some notes from herri’s full stack web developer on the AI phenomenon
galleri
THANDIWE MURIU
4 Universal Truths and selected Camo
ZENZI MDA
Four Portals
TIISETSO CLIFFORD MPHUTHI
Litema
NESA FRÖHLICH
Agapanthus artificialis: Biodiversität im digitalen Raum. Vierteilige Serie, Johannesburg 2022.
STEVEN J FOWLER
2 AI collaborations and 9 asemic scribbles
PATRICIA ANN REPAR
Integrating Healing Arts and Health Care
SHERRY MILNER
Fetus & Host
borborygmus
JANNIKE BERGH
BCUC = BANTU CONTINUA UHURU CONSCIOUSNESS
GWEN ANSELL
Jill Richards: Try, try, try...
VULANE MTHEMBU & HEIKKI SOINI
Nguni Machina remixed
AFRICAN NOISE FOUNDATION
Perennial fashion – noise (After Adorno).
RAJAT NEOGY
Do Magazines Culture?
NDUMISO MDAYI
Biko and the Hegelian dialectic
LEHLOHONOLO MAKHELE
The Big Other
frictions
KHAHLISO MATELA
At Virtue’s Zone
DIANA FERRUS
In memory of “Lily” who will never be nameless again
VUYOKAZI NGEMNTU
Six Poems from the Shadows
SIHLE NTULI
3 Durban Poems
SIBONELO SOLWAZI KA NDLOVU
I’m Writing You A Letter You Will Never read
OMOSEYE BOLAJI
People of the Townships episode 3
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SIMON GIKANDI
Introducing Pelong Ya Ka (excerpt)
UNATHI SLASHA
"TO WALK IS TO SEE": Looking Inside the Heart - Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng’s Pelong ya Ka
VANGILE GANTSHO
Ilifa lothando – a Review of Ilifa by Athambile Masola
ZIZIPHO BAM
Barbara Boswell found in The Art of Waiting for Tales
WAMUWI MBAO
Hauntings: the public appearance of what is hidden
CHARL-PIERRE NAUDÉ
Dekonstruksie as gebundelde terrorisme
VUYOKAZI NGEMNTU
Ibuzwa Kwabaphambili - A Review
MPHUTLANE WA BOFELO
Taking radical optimism beyond hope - Amakomiti: Grassroots Democracy in South Africa’s Shack Settlements
PATRIC TARIQ MELLET
WHITE MISCHIEF – Our past (again) filtered through the lens of coloniality: Andrew Smith’s First People – The lost history of the Khoisan
CHANTAL WILLIE-PETERSEN
BHEKI MSELEKU: an infinite source of knowledge to draw from
JEAN MEIRING
SULKE VRIENDE IS SKAARS - a clarion call for the importance of the old and out-of-fashion
GEORGE KING
Kristian Blak String Quartets Neoquartet
ekaya
PAKAMA NCUME
A Conversation with Mantombi Matotiyana 9 April 2019
KYLE SHEPHERD
An Auto-Ethnographic Reflection on Process
PAULA FOURIE
Ghoema
DENIS-CONSTANT MARTIN
The Art of Cape Town Singing: Anwar Gambeno (1949-2022)
ESTHER MARIE PAUW
Something in Return, Act II: The Blavet-Varèse project
STEPHANUS MULLER
Afrikosmos: the keyboard as a Turing machine
MKHULU MNGOMEZULU
Ubizo and Mental Illness: A Personal Reflection
off the record
FRANK MEINTJIES
James Matthews: dissident writer
SABATA-MPHO MOKAE
Platfontein, a place the !Xun and Khwe call home
NEO LEKGOTLA LAGA RAMOUPI
A Culture of Black Consciousness on Robben Island, 1970 - 1980
NELSON MALDONADO-TORRES
Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality*
ARYAN KAGANOF
An interview with Don Laka: Monday 10 February 2003
JONATHAN EATO
Recording and Listening to Jazz and Improvised Music in South Africa
MARKO PHIRI
Bulawayo’s movement of Jah People
STEVEN BROWN
Anger and me
feedback
MUSA NGQUNGWANA
15 May 2020
ARYAN KAGANOF / PONE MASHIANGWAKO
Tuesday 21 July 2020, Monday 27 July, 2020
MARIA HELLSTRÖM REIMER
Monday 26 July 2021
SHANNON LANDERS
22 December 2022
FACEBOOK FEEDBACK
Facebook
the selektah
CHRIS ALBERTYN
Lost, unknown and forgotten: 24 classic South African 78rpm discs from 1951-1965.
hotlynx
shopping
contributors
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CHRIS BRINK
Reflections on Transformation at Stellenbosch University
MARK WIGLEY
Discursive versus Immersive: The Museum is the Massage
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Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
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    #08
  • Theme AI in Africa

MARTIJN PANTLIN

Some notes from herri’s full stack web developer on the AI phenomenon

On Jan 9 2023, at 5:54 pm, martijn wrote:

I didn’t have time to play around yet, but I want to test out some form of integration with the chatGPT API and herri. There are already 2 interesting browser extensions I found using chatGTP:

This one can use the web to augment its results. Currently chatGTP is based on a static database from years up to 2021. So newer information on the net is not indexed and used by the bot. This plugin tries to pull in current data from the web to make better time sensitive responses.

Merlin openai chatgpt (might not be available on Firefox yet)

The bot can respond to anything you select in a website, summarize a piece of text, explain a concept further, looks for a solution on a question, etc.

Here’s how it works:

➡️ Simply select any online content

➡️ Click on Cmd+M (Mac) or Ctrl+M (Windows) to open Merlin box

➡️ Choose what you want to do with it (create a reply, summarize, make it shorter, or add some fun)

➡️ And voila! You’ll get an 80% done reply at your fingertips

But it’s too early. The servers of chatGPT are completely overloaded and they keep changing ways to access it. It will be behind a paywall soon. Many companies are being built on top already, and they will charge for their services. Trained AI bots will get so incredibly valuable over time, finally people will begin to understand the impact of giving all of their data for free to a few giants, exploiting and censoring it they way they see fit to make gains. We are at the mercy of our own output and it will come back to haunt us in spectacular ways.

JURGEN MEEKEL: This is great Martijn, I tried Merlin in Chrome and it works well… and is still for free. How long will it take for Merlin AI to become a paid feature?

soon.

it takes energy to run those servers, energy needs to be paid by someone, preferably the user. part of the API will probably remain free in order to gain more usage data and train the bot via iteration and self learning to constantly improve output, aka satisfy the user more.

unless politics derive consensus about financing ‘free public bots for the good of humanity’ via subsidies or other means, smart AI will not be accessible for the ‘poor’, hence only enlarging the gap between classes. government sponsored bots are susceptible to corruption and censorship, and also don’t feel like the best solution.

fast access to data has always been monetized, far before the digital age.

the term ‘Open AI’ is nice, but who is sponsoring this venture?

who’s in control of the data feeds and filters?

blockchain promises to ‘solve’ this dilemma, by offering decentralized AI that is open source and managed by a ‘democratic’ DAO. SingularityNET is a project combining artificial intelligence and blockchain to democratize access to artificial intelligence.

it’s run by a well known AI researcher.

Ocean Protocol offers a decentralized marketplace for data sets. this enables anyone to purchase this data for training purposes. the data is encrypted, so it cannot be copied or extracted by the licenser, only used for computations.

as long as the data sets are from a ‘true’ source and raw, various parties could train various bots on the same data, creating ‘personality’ in bots, like left- or right-wing oriented.

so my current conclusion: nothing changes, just everything is being digitized, in which there might be no limits.

apple will launch its first AR glasses this year, which could mark an ‘iphone like’ singularity in the normalization of ‘augmented reality’, by your own set variables. your living room could become a permanent tropical aquarium and your friends all frog-like. real time stable diffusion will be able to feed you any audio visual experience you can dream of (censored of course, just not on the dark web).

this is the matrix.

and thus we dream on…

i wish future generations good luck, they will adapt and be alright.

again, nothing changes, just our perception.

i’m happy to have contributed to this data in a hopefully meaningful way, by responding to forum questions and asking questions that were answered.

that’s a counter argument against my credo ‘my data is my data’, in which i explore the possibilities of not sharing data publicly. one could argue that by not ‘participating’ in the creation of data that can be mined, one’s values, patterns and preferences are not included into the model.

kinda like a digitized version of not having kids and ‘training them’ with your belief systems.

as we all know, kids will change and adopt their own belief system by self learning, hence ‘self learning AI’.

for now this saves me a minute of development time and some biological memory usage:

“The nothingness of digital code may shape the individual’s inner life and exclude the human from processes of self-knowledge. Indeed, humans currently do not possess a mode of access to the apparatus any more than they have insight into a mind-independent reality.”

Andrew C. Wenaus
Literature of Exclusion: Dada, Data and the Threshold of Electronic Literature

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