A dialogue on digital humanism in Africa

AI-powered chatbots have become so ingrained into everyday life that it’s hard to imagine going back to a world without ChatGPT. But while these chatbots get better and better at generating code, drafting emails, and everything in between, they still have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to languages. More than a thousand languages are spoken in Africa alone, but ChatGPT only officially supports less than 60 languages worldwide.

So what happens when ChatGPT speaks your language poorly, or doesn’t speak it at all?

Participants in the first-ever Summer School on Digital Humanism in Africa gathered at CMU-Africa from July 14 to 18 to workshop just these types of questions.

Digital humanism challenges people to investigate the relationship between humanity and technology, improving our understanding of how technology can be designed and used in ethical, beneficial, and inclusive ways. Doing so requires interdisciplinary discussion and collaboration, involving perspectives from both engineering and technology-related fields and the social sciences and humanities.

The summer school, designed to foster such collaboration, was organized by Carine Mukazakuma, assistant teaching professor at CMU-Africa. Mukazakuma was first exposed to the idea of digital humanism when she was a Ph.D. student at Vienna Technical University; her advisor, Hannes Werthner, was the first to define the term and co-founded the Digital Humanism Initiative.

In 2019, the Initiative’s Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism, which has since been signed by over a thousand world leaders, called for intentional technological development that serves humankind, rather than humankind serving technology. Since then, most of the conversation around digital humanism has still centered around and taken place in Europe, where it originated. But Mukazakuma saw broader potential for the philosophy.

“Digital humanism is the idea of including people when we create technology for the betterment of humans. It encourages the creation of solutions that genuinely consider the needs, values, and experiences of those who will use them, fostering technology that truly serves humanity,” says Mukazakuma. “I thought, ‘If this is helping in Europe, why not in Africa?’”

If this is helping in Europe, why not in Africa?

Carine Mukazakuma, Assistant Teaching Professor, CMU-Africa

Experts in digital humanism from Africa, Europe, and the United States answered Mukazakuma’s call and traveled to Kigali to share their knowledge at the summer school. In morning and afternoon lectures, they highlighted the use of technology in areas like education and government services and led discussions on policy and societal impacts of technology.

In the evenings, participants teamed up to tackle digital humanism case studies. The groups worked on use cases, which were focused this year on language representation and equity as related to large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. The project topics included evaluating LLMs’ abilities to identify languages used in regional discussion forms like subreddits, understand when norms are violated in cross-cultural communication, translate between English and officially or non-officially supported African languages, and more.

The final presentations revealed many areas where LLMs still lack important language and cultural fluency. Through their work on the use cases, the participants were able to think about new sides to technologies and identify flaws in the tools we rely on that people often overlook.

The summer school welcomed 64 students from 16 countries, primarily master’s and doctoral students along with other qualified individuals working in industry, civil society, or at public institutions.

Huda Usman, chemical engineering Ph.D. student, and Amy Apgar, biomedical engineering Ph.D. student, both advised by Tagbo Niepa at CMU-Pittsburgh, attended the summer school, serving as project coordinators. Even though they helped out behind the scenes, they absorbed meaningful takeaways from the summer school just as the students did.

Usman and Apgar were both drawn to concepts from the lecture portions of the summer school, such as the African philosophy ubuntu, which means “I am, because we are.”

While algorithms like those used by social media platforms can counterintuitively make us feel isolated, ubuntu reminds us that we can use technology in ways that support our interpersonal connections. “We should have the same sense of community in the digital world as we do in the physical world,” says Apgar.

Likewise, Usman was inspired by Hannes Werthner’s idea of backcasting: imagining what we want our lives to look like and the role we want technology to play in them, and building towards that vision.

“What do we want our Golden Age to look like? What future do we want to live in?” asks Usman.