Africans must take control of their digital destiny – AI Trainer

Mr Faraday Odoom Ocran, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Trainer at Knowledge Web Centre, has called for the need for Africans to generate their own data system to feed AI programming.Mr. Ocran said AI relied on data to learn and make decisions; hence, the need to record the beautiful African stories, histories, and cultural knowledge, perspective, and experiences, to be reflected and preserved for future generations to access in AI systems.He said this in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) on the sidelines of an AI training workshop for the Tema Regional Branch of the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA), organised by the African Diaspora Central Bank (ADCB), in collaboration with the Vanuatu Trade Commission, Ghana, and Knowledge Web Centre.The training, which was supported by the Centre for International Maritime Affairs Ghana and the Tema Metropolitan Assembly, was aimed at building the competences of journalists in AI prompt engineering.He explained that African countries must unite to collect, store, and share data from the African perspective for AI to learn and develop solutions tailored towards the challenges on the continent and create jobs to stimulate economic growth in the digital sector, among others.Mr Ocran, who doubles as the Head of the Human Resource Management Department of Ghana Education Service (GES) Gomoa East, said the AI system was largely from Western sources, leading to biased outcomes; therefore, Africans need to counterbalance existing biases in the system, by writing and sharing the authentic African narratives.He said building the data system would require collaboration between governments, institutions, agencies, organisations, and individuals, to invest in its infrastructure and upload and update them on the internet to make it easy for the African story to be told.He called on business owners and Ghanaians at large to take advantage of AI, to be more efficient and productive.Source: Ghana News Agency