How AI Is changing journalism and why we must detect it early:
Artificial intelligence is no longer just a buzzword floating around Silicon Valley — it’s already reshaping journalism, including here in South Africa. From helping newsrooms automate headlines to generating full-length articles, AI’s influence is being felt in everything from productivity tools to editorial decisions. But with this powerful innovation comes a deeper responsibility: making sure readers know who—or what—is really behind the words they consume.
That’s where the role of an AI detector becomes crucial.
AI’s Rise in the Media: Help or Harm?
Let’s be clear: not all AI is bad for journalism. In fact, some of it is genuinely useful. South African newsrooms are experimenting with AI to assist with basic tasks—transcribing interviews, summarising data-heavy reports, and even analysing audience engagement trends. These tools free up time for journalists to focus on more critical work: investigations, deep analysis, and ground reporting.
But problems arise when AI goes from assisting to replacing.
When media outlets start using generative AI to write full articles—especially on complex or sensitive topics—several risks emerge:
- Lack of context: AI doesn’t “understand” the news. It predicts words based on data, which can lead to misleading headlines or out-of-touch narratives.
- No accountability: If a mistake is made, who takes responsibility? The machine or the human who used it?
- Erosion of trust: If readers suspect that journalism is being outsourced to algorithms, they may begin to distrust everything they read—even the good stuff.
In a country like South Africa, where media plays a vital role in holding power to account and highlighting social inequalities, the stakes are even higher.
Why We Need AI Detection Tools Now
As the line between human-written and machine-generated content becomes blurrier, tools that can identify AI-generated text are no longer optional—they’re essential.
This is where AI detectors come in.
Platforms like ZeroGPT allow editors, teachers, researchers, and even casual readers to paste in a piece of content and see whether it’s likely written by a human or by AI. It’s not just about pointing fingers—it’s about transparency. Readers have a right to know whether what they’re reading came from a journalist’s lived experience or a language model trained on scraped internet data.
AI detectors can also be a safeguard in academia, public policy, and even law areas where ghostwritten AI content could mislead decision-makers or be used to manipulate public opinion.
Journalism Must Remain Human at Its Core
The great value of journalism has always been its human touch. South African journalism, in particular, is built on stories told with cultural nuance, empathy, and lived reality. Whether it’s a frontline report from a protest in Tshwane, a profile of an activist in Khayelitsha, or an investigation into corporate corruption, these are not just “content pieces”—they are stories rooted in context, perspective, and social consequence.
AI doesn’t live in our communities. It doesn’t experience injustice. It can’t ask a follow-up question in an interview because it felt something was off. Journalists do.
So while we may welcome AI as a tool, we must reject it as a substitute for the human voices that make journalism matter.
What Readers Can Do
If you’re a regular reader of news—whether from Mail & Guardian or elsewhere—you don’t need technical skills to become more media literate in the age of AI. Here are a few steps you can take:
- Ask questions: Does this article feel oddly generic? Does it lack quotes, context, or depth?
- Use AI detection tools: Free platforms like AI detector let you check whether a piece of text was likely AI-generated.
- Support ethical media: Subscribe to outlets that are transparent about how they create content and who writes it.
Final Thoughts: Transparency Over Hype
AI isn’t going away—and nor should it. Used wisely, it can be a powerful support tool in modern journalism. But left unchecked, it risks diluting one of democracy’s most critical pillars: an informed, empowered public.
That’s why tools like an AI detector should be part of every journalist’s toolkit—not as a form of censorship, but as a commitment to truth and transparency.
We must ensure that in our rush to embrace the future, we don’t forget what made journalism valuable in the first place: human curiosity, accountability, and empathy.
We need to change – not reject – black economic empowerment:
More than two decades since its inception, black economic empowerment (BEE) has not delivered on its promise of economic redress for the majority of South Africans.
Recent developments have reignited public debate. The Democratic Alliance (DA) has launched a court challenge against the Employment Equity Amendment Act, specifically targeting section 15A. This section empowers the minister of employment and labour to set numerical targets for equitable representation of designated groups. The DA argues that these targets amount to unconstitutional, rigid racial quotas that harm economic growth and violate individual rights.
BEE was introduced to correct the deep economic disparities of apartheid. While it has made some gains, most notably the growth of a black middle class, it has failed to catalyse broad-based economic participation or significantly reduce structural inequality.
But this critique is not a rejection of the principle of economic redress. South Africa’s history of dispossession and exclusion demands purposeful intervention to build a more just and inclusive economy. Redress remains essential, particularly in a society where inequality continues to follow racial lines. But the current model of BEE is not the vehicle that will take us there.
To be considered middle class in South Africa, one must earn R15,000 and R50,000 a month. Today, the black middle class numbers about 3.4 million people, or 7%, of the black African population. With a spending power of R400 billion annually, this segment plays a vital role in the consumer economy, driving growth in sectors such as retail, real estate and banking.
This progress, however, is far from sufficient. South Africa’s population is about 60 million, and more than half still live in poverty. While the black middle class has grown by more than 30% in the past decade, 33 million South Africans remain impoverished. In contrast, 40% to 50% of the 4.4 million white South Africans are considered middle class, a stark reflection of persistent racial disparities rooted in historical advantage.
Youth unemployment at crisis levels. BEE, despite its noble intent, has not significantly altered the economic trajectory of the country’s youth. Youth unemployment in South Africa is the highest in the world. According to Statistics South Africa’s 2024 data, more than 4.9 million young people aged 15 to 34 are not in employment, education or training (NEET).
In the first quarter of 2025, the unemployment rate among youth aged 15 to 24 was 59.6%, for youth aged 15 to 34, the overall unemployment rate stood at 45.5%, nearly 1.9 million young people were classified as discouraged work-seekers, about 58.7% of unemployed youth had no previous work experience and the North West and Eastern Cape provinces recorded youth unemployment rates of 58.8% and 54.3%, respectively.
The structural barriers that prevent young people from economic opportunities remain largely unaddressed. Poor-quality schooling, lack of access to capital and networks, delayed entry into the labour market and limited exposure to work experience continue to lock young people out of the economy.
Although BEE includes youth-oriented components such as skills development and enterprise support, these efforts have been superficial and fragmented. They have not created sustainable pathways into employment or reshaped the labour market to enable long-term inclusion. Too often, the private sector’s BEE initiatives are limited to box-ticking, offering bursaries or internships for compliance points rather than as part of a genuine strategy for transformation. These initiatives tend to be short-term, urban-centred and disconnected from labour market demands.
The result is a cycle of unfulfilled promises. Skills programmes churn out graduates with little to no employment prospects. Enterprise development schemes favour established players with political ties, while young entrepreneurs, particularly those in rural or informal sectors struggle to access supply chains, funding and regulatory support.
After three decades, BEE has not dismantled structural barriers to economic participation. What is needed is not the abandonment of redress, but a fundamental reimagining of how it is pursued, one that is rooted in equity, participation and structural transformation, rather than symbolic compliance and patronage.
The broad-based BEE commission has reported a rise in fronting practices, where companies misrepresent ownership or employment statistics to qualify for empowerment status. This not only undermines the policy’s credibility but also further excludes youth from opportunity. In practice, the system is designed to reward those already in the room, not those trying to get in.
The 2022 National Human Development Report paints an even starker picture: the face of unemployment in South Africa is young, black and female. During the third quarter of 2021, the unemployment rate among black South Africans was 39%, nine percentage points higher than coloured South Africans and 30 percentage points higher than white people.
Educational attainment also plays a role: 40% of unemployed youth had not completed matric, while only 13% of unemployed youth held a tertiary qualification.
Despite frequent references to “emerging enterprises,” the system does little to support genuine youth entrepreneurship. Without serious efforts to reduce red tape, promote youth-led innovation and align procurement with inclusive growth, economic empowerment through entrepreneurship will remain a hollow promise.
BEE in its current form will not solve the youth unemployment crisis. It will not level the playing field for future generations. And it will not deliver the economic justice that has long been promised to South Africans.
What is needed is a fundamental reimagining of economic inclusion. This requires moving beyond elite redistribution and towards broad-based economic renewal. South Africa must invest in quality basic education, expand public works and guaranteed jobs programmes for youth, radically reform procurement to favour township and rural businesses, and consider progressive policies such as a universal basic income.
Most importantly, young people must be placed at the centre of policy design, not as passive recipients of aid, but as co-creators of the economic future.
What is needed is real opportunity, rooted in justice, driven by equity, and delivered with urgency.
Tara Roos is a policy writer, researcher and political analyst.
From Jan Smuts to Gareth Prince: The struggle for the liberation of cannabis continues:
As Africa Month ends, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) wishes to draw attention to a key struggle for African self-determination, remembering and “re-membering”. That struggle is the struggle for the full liberation of cannabis.
Cannabis is a plant which has been used by indigenous South African people in medicinal and spiritual practices for centuries. The struggle for the right to grow, trade and use cannabis can thus be seen as a decolonial one — to reclaim and re-legitimise indigenous knowledge systems, African religion, spirituality and self-determination. The struggle has continued throughout South Africa’s democratic dispensation.
On 7 March 2025, the minister of health gazetted a new regulation banning cannabis and hemp foodstuffs under the Foodstuffs, Cosmetics and Disinfectants Act 54 of 1972. After widespread contestation and backlash over the constitutionality of the regulations, the minister withdrew them three weeks later.
These regulations came unexpectedly, while the Rastafari and cannabis communities were waiting for the draft regulations, which would bring into effect the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act 7 of 2024, from the justice department.
The regulation by the minister came exactly a 100 years after cannabis was classified as a controlled drug in 1925 at the Geneva Opium Convention. The classification resulted from a proposal by colonial regimes, including South Africa. Prime minister Jan Smuts was a leading sponsor at the League of Nations, placing cannabis in the same category as cocaine. Cannabis communities thus considered the withdrawn regulations as continued disenfranchisement and suppression of cannabis communities.
Less than two weeks prior to the gazetting of the regulation, on 26 February 2025, the SAHRC convened a meeting with other chapter 9 institutions, government departments, civil society and members of the Rastafari community from all nine provinces — the Rights of the Rastafari Roundtable. The Rastafari National Council was also represented.
This provided a space for the Rastafari and other cannabis communities to engage in dialogue, to be heard, to affirm their dignity and to find solutions to the structural challenges they experience.
The roundtable was precipitated by the SAHRC’s discussions with the Rastafari community throughout 2024 where it was troubled by the stories of the systematic and personal violations experienced by this community. Through these sessions emerged accounts of discrimination, criminalisation and persecution — not only because of their cultivation and use of cannabis but because of the general lack of recognition for Rastafari as a community deserving of respect, protection and equal standing in society.
The experience of advocate Gareth Prince is one of the better-known examples of the Rastafari struggle. In 1998, the Cape Law Society refused Prince’s application to be admitted as an attorney because of his criminal record for possessing cannabis, thereby stripping him of his right to work and earn a livelihood from his profession. Prince is still unemployed and believes members of the Rastafari community are treated as “third-class citizens” in South Africa. Prince’s experience is a reality for almost all Rastafari.
At community discussions and the roundtable, Rastafari parents informed the SAHRC of the humiliation at being searched by police officers in front of their children. They believe that their visible Rastafari appearance renders them easy targets for police officials, which amounts to racial and cultural profiling.
They endure marital discord when they disagree with their partners on the decision to cut their children’s dreadlocks, so that they can be accepted in certain schools, and due to the overt and subtle discrimination against and bullying of Rastafari children.
They shared stories of living under precarious employment conditions as they endure regular drug testing by employers because of their visible Rastafari identity and appearance. They suffer unlawful searches of their homes, expulsion from schools, medical neglect at health facilities and social stigmatisation.
One Rastafari delegate at the roundtable asked the government stakeholders represented: “… To what extent have your institutions decolonised and transformed? Because, from where I’m sitting, and from your presentations, you are part and parcel of the colonial legacy … because the laws that you are implementing are not the laws that represent us.”
They wondered why other religious communities’ marriage ceremonies were recognised by the state, but theirs were not. They wondered why their religion, with its African origins, was frowned upon by fellow Africans in an African state. They conveyed their sense of voicelessness in South Africa’s democratic culture because they choose not to engage in protest action. They felt “unseen” and “unhuman” and carried a heavy sense of non-belonging — pariahs, even under the new dispensation.
The unfair discrimination against the Rastafari community and their social position as a marginalised group has largely been left out of the popular discourse about equality and transformation in South Africa’s body politic. And yet, the Rastafari community continues to experience some of the worst violations of constitutional rights, including their rights to equality, religion, culture, dignity, health and education.
The gazetting of the foodstuffs regulations is an example of the exclusion of the Rastafari from the democratic processes of decision-making in matters that affect them, and is a continuation of paternalistic colonial and apartheid attitudes to this community, and the cannabis plant.
Despite a 2018 constitutional court judgment which decriminalised private cannabis use by adults, as well as and the signing into law of the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act 7 of 2024, the Rastafari continue to be arrested for cannabis-related crimes. Police officials conduct these arrests in violation of an August 2023 South African Police Service directive pausing cannabis-related arrests, issued by the national commissioner of police.
The Cannabis Act only allows for arrests for dealing in cannabis, where there are reasonable grounds to suspect dealing. Yet, the complaints received by the SAHRC from the Rastafari community suggest that most arrests are still for private possession and use. Because of a lack of regulations from the justice department, which would specify quantities, the definition of “dealing” has been left to the discretion of individual police officials.
Because of the continuing structural and systemic human rights violations which have left the Rastafari community unrecognised, vulnerable, marginalised and criminalised, the office of commissioner Tshepo Madlingozi, at the SAHRC’s head office, has designated the Rastafari as one of its two priority communities. The office aims to continue being a partner to the Rastafari and other cannabis communities, to help them regain their human rights.
To bring the Rastafari, and other cannabis communities, into the fold of South African society, the state should be more proactive in recognising them as a legitimate community that requires similar protections and measures of redress to other previously disadvantaged and marginalised communities.
This includes ceasing all cannabis-related arrests, prohibiting discrimination against children with dreadlocks in private and public schools and expunging all criminal records for persons who have been convicted of cannabis-related crimes. It is imperative that the justice department urgently develops clear and precise regulations on the use and possession of cannabis, including quantities, to guide both cannabis users and the criminal justice cluster.
While having been at the forefront of the fight for the decriminalisation of cannabis, members of the Rastafari community feel excluded from the recent rapid commercialisation of the plant. They report that the licensing process is too bureaucratic and expensive, creating artificial barriers to their participation in the formal cannabis economy. In the meantime, “cannabis shops” are mushrooming in many urban centres, despite their existence in a legal grey area.
These and other concerns will be taken forward by the SAHRC in partnership with the Rastafari community and other stakeholders. One such initiative was held on 13 March where SAHRC commissioners Sandra Selokela Makoasha and Philile Ntuli hosted a roundtable specifically for Rastafari women, to provide a safe space for expression and discussion of their specific experiences as a result of their multi-fold identity and intersecting social position as Rastafari, women, wives, mothers, caregivers, workers and cannabis producers and traders.
But all interventions such as these, by state and non-state actors, will be rendered ineffective as long as the broader South African society continues to stigmatise and discriminate against the Rastafari. From Jan Smuts to Gareth Prince, the struggle against state overreach and for the valorisation of indigenous cultures and practices continues.
Tshepo Madlingozi is a commissioner responsible for anti-racism, education and equality at the South African Human Rights Commission and Naleli Morojele is a research adviser at the commission.
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