By Nomalanga Mashinini
Publication Date: 2026-04-29 15:06:00
South Africa’s first attempt to establish a binding policy framework for artificial intelligence (AI) collapsed abruptly just 16 days after its official release.
On April 10, the Ministry of Communications and Digital Technologies released a draft national policy on artificial intelligence in South Africa for public comment.
Journalists checked the references and found that they contained fakes. These fell into two categories: academic journals, which do not exist; and real journals in which the referenced research articles were never published.
Read more: AI policy in Africa: lessons from Ghana and Rwanda
Such inventions are typical of a well-known generative AI problem called hallucination.
The communications minister withdrew the draft and made it clear: the problem was not a technical error, but a oversight oversight. Generative AI was deployed without proper human review of sources, jeopardizing credibility and…
