Artificial Intelligence and Artistic Creation as Unfolding in Africa

thesoleadventurer.com Delphine Buysse explores how artificial intelligence (AI) intersects with artistic creation in Africa, emphasizing both critical engagement and structural inequalities. Focusing on the 2021 Afropixel Festival in Dakar, she highlights how artists and cultural actors used exhibitions, workshops, and conferences to confront algorithmic biases and address the global asymmetries embedded in AI technologies—often dominated by Western corporate and epistemic frameworks.Buysse critiques the cultural appropriation of African visual heritage, particularly through the example of the French collective Obvious, whose AI-generated African masks raise unresolved questions around authorship, power, and exploitation. She underscores how cognitive and racial biases in AI systems, as well as exploitative labor practices in the Global South, reinforce existing hierarchies.The article also sheds light on African-led initiatives such as Masakhane and Deep Learning Indaba, which aim to decolonize AI by fostering research in African languages and local contexts. Ultimately, Buysse argues for a critical and situated use of AI in the arts—one that acknowledges its political, ethical, and cultural dimensions, and centers African agency in shaping technological futures.