The government has been racing against time to come up with a policy to regulate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in South Africa. So eager to beat deadlines, it would seem, one or more officials at the department of communication enlisted the assistance of AI to draft the policy.
It has since been reported in the media that some of the research referenced in the policy document was fake and made up by AI — which is famously prone to hallucinations.
A red-faced communications minister, Solly Malatsi, says he has asked his director-general to investigate. Hogarth hopes the DG doesn’t enlist the help of AI in his probe.
You can’t make this stuff up. Actually, Hogarth is mistaken: AI can.
Facts take a battering
As if that is not embarrassing enough, it turns out the department of science and technology has a new advert in which it correctly states that South Africa holds 80% of the world’s platinum reserves but then goes on to spoil the whole thing by claiming that platinum “is a critical ingredient” in EV batteries.
Fact-checking is clearly not a strength in the government of national unity.
US of Arithmetic it is not
If AI and physics are subjects that are puzzling our bureaucrats, they can take comfort in the fact that they are not alone.
Defending the Orange One’s recent claim that drug prices had dropped 600% since he took office, US health secretary Robert F Kennedy invented a new way of calculating percentages.
“Well, if the drug was $100 and it rises to $600, that would be a 600% rise. If it drops from $600 to $100, that’s a 600% savings.”
Maybe we should send some of our maths literacy teachers over to the US to help out.
Cupcake goes full FOMO
Poor Cupcake is not taking South Africa’s exclusion from this year’s G20 summit meetings well. Shem. President Cyril Ramaphosa was at Wits University the other day at some important symposium about global economic inequality.
In his opening remarks, he told the audience about an unnamed university whose lecture rooms were always so full that some students had to stand outside and follow proceedings by listening through the windows. One of the students, he claimed, was then overheard complaining that she was attending “lectures by rumour”.
“As you well know, we now, as South Africa, attend the G20 meetings just by rumour, having been completely excluded … We follow what is happening at the G20 by rumour,” Cupcake complained.
However, Hogarth thinks he should thank his ancestors that he does not have to sit through a long lecture on Trumponomics by a rambling US president.
From cadre to cast deployment
With national police commissioner Gen Fannie Masemola now attending court as an accused along with the man — Cat Matlala — he and KwaZulu-Natal commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi have been chasing, Ramaphosa acted uncharacteristically quickly by suspending him.
While this is a welcome change in approach for a president who usually takes ages to act, the downside of the move is that we now have both an acting police minister and an acting national police commissioner.
With such important positions held by acting people, can we really blame our youth when they say: “South Africa is a movie”?
A mermaid who can switch her tale?
The Jozi Mermaid, also known as Helen Zille, eased up on her acting this week with no new videos of her swimming through a pothole or rowing through a water-logged Soweto road. But this did not mean that she had abandoned her bid to succeed Dada Morero as Jozi mayor. Far from it. She spent much of the time canvassing at residents’ meetings for a DA victory in November.
In one of those meetings she told supporters that if she did not win the mayoral post outright, she would not go into a coalition with the ANC but would work with ActionSA, the IFP, the ACDP and other parties.
Hogarth thought he had heard a similar declaration before … Oh, yes, that is what the DA and its then leader, John Steenhuisen, said as they lured the above-mentioned parties into the “Moonshot Pact”, which they immediately abandoned when the ANC came calling.
Will it be a case of once bitten twice shy for ActionSA, ACDP and others?
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