Johannesburg: Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Mmamoloko Kubayi has warned that artificial intelligence (AI) systems largely trained on foreign datasets risk perpetuating racial bias and undermining South Africa's transformative constitutional vision if they are not infused with local historical context. The Minister delivered remarks at the University of Johannesburg's 'AI and the Law' conference.
According to South African Government News Agency, she explained that while AI-powered solutions could drastically reduce legal costs and delays, the same technology could just as easily increase access to injustice if deployed without transparency, accountability, and data that reflects the country's apartheid past. "African Data which carry our archives, African languages, and cultural nuance, do not find expression in the AI machines that are currently used in the various fields, including law. Most AI is trained on datasets from North America and Asia," Kubayi said. She warned that this exclusion perpetuates data poverty and algorithmic bias, leading to real-world consequences such as poor language translation machines, especially for African languages.
The Minister acknowledged that despite the challenges presented, AI systems stand to increase justice for all. She highlighted that prohibitive legal costs, geographic remoteness from courts and legal services, lengthy delays in case resolution, and a shortage of legal practitioners willing or able to serve lower-income communities are barriers to universal access to justice. "By automating repetitive processes, advancing legal research, drafting, increasing dispute resolution, and encouraging predictive legal analytics, the introduction of AI-powered solutions has drastically transformed the delivery of legal services," she noted.
Kubayi posed probing questions, emphasizing the need for AI to align with South Africa's transformative Constitution, which was drafted to "heal the divisions of the past" and lay a foundation for social justice. She urged that technological progress should not lead to digitized racial segregation and questioned the capability of biased AI systems to help build a just society. Kubayi called on university leaders to address these critical issues, expressing confidence that the conference would tackle these challenges to leverage AI for advancing the Sustainable Development Goals through Law, Governance, and Practice.