ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS IN SOUTH AFRICAN HIGHER EDUCATION: A POLICY FRAMEWORK PERSPECTIVE

As an increasing number of South African universities begin to consider and implement artificial intelligence systems, there is an accompanying concern about the ethical aspects that these innovations could have on society. Public discourse and scholarly research that raise concerns about AI’s impact on important societal systems, such as political and gender biases, are numerous. Current policies on higher education in South Africa are silent when it comes to how AI ethical implications may be addressed. The paper explores higher education’s current focus on AI and what external policies say about ethical AI and related technologies in the context of their applications.Robotic process automation, as one of the earlier forms of AI, is being used in South African higher education to automate administrative operations. Through a combination of a policy analysis method and case study approach, we analyze the policy framework. The paper then shows how the policy neither explicitly addresses ethical AI nor critical ICT applications like artificial intelligence and mimics systems. The paper concludes that policy framework development for addressing ethical challenges related to AI should become an immediate priority. These findings emerge from an ongoing empirical study on the South African higher education sector regarding artificial intelligence. This study contributes to policy formulation in higher education to stimulate an ethically responsible AI environment. The study’s research focus on South African higher education provides a gap in current literature that is mainly focused on AI policy developments in developed nations, which currently do not have a comparative acceleration of AI and related technologies.