Electric South
Artificial intelligence is reshaping how creative tech is created, governed, and monetised, raising urgent questions about cultural ownership, authorship, and whose knowledge informs AI systems within Africa’s creative economy.
In September 2025, Electric South hosted the second AI & Immersive Media Convening across three creative and maker spaces in Johannesburg. The convening brought together artists, filmmakers, game designers, sound artists, immersive storytellers, researchers, data scientists, philosophers, and AI ethics specialists for three days of cross-disciplinary exchange on AI, immersive media, and creative practice.
At the centre of the convening was a shared proposition: practitioners working directly with AI and immersive technologies are critical knowledge holders in AI governance, yet are often excluded from formal policy and regulatory processes. Through practice, they encounter how AI systems operate in context – how bias emerges in outputs, how authorship is redistributed, how consent is negotiated in generative systems, and how cultural materials are extracted, reused, and often unacknowledged in training datasets.
Building on Electric South’s 2024 Convening in Cape Town, the AI, Artists and Africa Toolkit, and the Responsible AI for African Artists webinar series, the 2025 Convening moved from identifying shared concerns toward structured articulation. A key outcome was the collaborative development of ‘Principles & Guidelines for AI in African Creative Practice’ a set of seven principles emerging from workshop sessions over the three days, intended to support more ethical, situated, and practitioner-led approaches to AI use in creative contexts.
Compared to 2024, which surfaced strong concerns around displacement and creative obsolescence, the 2025 Convening reflects a shift toward experimentation, applied engagement, and integration of AI tools into creative workflows—alongside ongoing tensions around ethics, access, environmental impact, and governance gaps.
The convening included pre-event webinars with Sandra Rodríguez, Brett Gaylor, and Ingrid Kopp (available on Electric South’s YouTube channel), as well as live podcasts recorded during the convening featuring Meghna Singh, Ian Mangenga, and Russel Hlongwane.
This report provides structured reflections on key themes, discussions, and the development of the 7 Principles & Guidelines for AI in African Creative Practice. It forms part of Electric South’s broader Policy and Research work to strengthen African-led AI governance and position creative practitioners as active contributors to emerging technology policy and design.
We acknowledge the passing of Chief Kevin Smith, lawyer, visionary, and participant in the 2025 Convening, whose contributions remain part of this collective work.
