Article by Rebecca Mbaya: “What happens when AI reads African data through the wrong frame and no one in the room knows enough to notice.
The output was clean. Structured. Confident. The generative AI tool had processed survey responses from 191 respondents and returned a set of neatly labelled themes. One of them appeared repeatedly across the data: “Misinformation Resistance.”
I stared at it for a long time.
The survey was about perceptions of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies (AI, IoT, blockchain) in a specific Congolese context. I had collected the data, I understood the political and historical texture of the community being studied. So what the AI tool(ChatGPT) had labelled “Misinformation Resistance” was not that. Not even close.What the responses actually reflected was something more specific, more historically grounded, and entirely rational: a deep, politically informed distrust of institutions. A community whose relationship with governance (colonial administration, post-independence instability, extractive foreign intervention, cycles of conflict) gave them every reason to be skeptical of new technologies promising transformation. This was a coherent epistemic posture developed over generations of having good reasons not to trust. The AI tool had taken a political trust phenomenon and filed it under cognitive bias. It had done this cleanly, confidently, and without any visible indication that something had gone wrong.
That gap between what the model produced and what the data actually meant was only visible to me because I knew the context. Which raises a question that I have not been able to stop thinking about: what happens in all the cases where no one in the room does?…(More)”.
