Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been adopted across various sectors, including healthcare, education, e-commerce, and digital marketing, offering solutions to many challenges and significantly reducing the time needed to complete tasks.
The technology is known for its ability to perform specific tasks faster and more efficiently than humans.
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On Monday, September 24, a discussion on X (formerly Twitter) addressed the potential of AI to align with Rwandan culture and its benefits. The conversation included an interesting set of speakers like Victor Muvunyi, the Senior Technologist for Emerging Technologies at the Ministry of ICT, Malik Shaffy, the CEO of 63 Inc, Pamela Mudakikwa, a communications consultant, and Chantal Umuhoza, a curator at the Rwanda Heritage Academy.
Malik who is from the creative industry began the discussion with an overview of AI, highlighting its role in assisting with day-to-day activities. He pointed out AI&039;s potential in preserving Rwandan culture.
"AI can help people write books, verify facts, and access information online more easily," he said, emphasizing the role AI could play in cultural preservation.
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"Rwandans should consider using the new technologies, in building or highlighting the Rwandan culture, which is such a historical moment, but that is also very dramatic," he added.
Malik noted that for Rwandan culture to be represented accurately across AI platforms like OpenAI, Google AI, and Microsoft Azure, it is essential to input accurate information. This would make AI more helpful and reduce the risk of misinformation.
"By the time people start to give AI prompt requests, it will be able to share the right information about Rwanda. AI is a channel. And AI gives us what we give to it.”
Muvunyi highlighted the government&039;s role in developing AI policies, with the Ministry of ICT overseeing emerging technologies. He explained that the AI policy includes various pillars aimed at ensuring that AI benefits Rwandans.
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"Among those pillars, there is one that is very specific on that, which is ethical guidelines. And, of course, ethics, which links with our culture," Muvunyi said.
He also mentioned the collaboration between the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Rwanda Biomedical Centre to create a chatbot that assists community health workers.
"The speciality is that the chatbot is being developed in Kinyarwanda," Muvunyi added.
Umuhoza, who was speaking from the Ethnographic Museum in Huye, highlighted AI’s role in promoting Rwandan heritage. Rwanda Heritage Academy has launched various projects, including virtual tours and collaborations with Google Arts and Culture, to make Rwandan culture more accessible.
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"The importance of using AI to promote Rwandan heritage or Rwandan culture is to allow people easy access to accurate information about Rwandan culture," she said.
Umuhoza pointed out the Academy’s work in using AI to record, transcribe, and translate oral histories to preserve narratives for future generations.
"We can also use AI as a tool to preserve all the cultural artifacts, like Ikirenge cya Ruganzu, which are subject to duplication and damage threats," she noted.
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Mudakikwa emphasized the potential of AI in preserving Rwandan history, including the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. She stressed the importance of educating Rwandans on both their history and AI.
"One of the key areas of the AI policy that Victor mentioned is AI literacy. So, I believe that we need to get educated. Everybody who is in charge of feeding that information into the systems, into the computers, needs to be literate," she said.
"We are the ones who own our history, our culture. So we are the authors and developers.”
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Malik highlighted the downside of AI, warning that it could encourage over-reliance, leading to laziness.
"So, we see people really making less effort nowadays on writing emails or doing what they are supposed to do, and then relying a lot on AI, which is not a bad thing. You should rely on AI, but exactly knowing what you&039;re working on," he stated, also raising concerns about the mismanagement of intellectual property, and called for policies to govern ethical AI use.
One listener noted that for AI to align with Rwandan cultural values and ethics, infrastructure is needed to train AI models in Kinyarwanda.
"You're talking about training them on so much data so that the biases from western culture are overrun and align with our culture," he said, stressing the need for to establish a local data center to support these efforts.