How AI is disrupting Africa’s creative industries and what creators can do about it - Tech Tides Africa

"I'm sorry, but I think you're aware your voice talent job is going to disappear."

I won't lie, when African creative industries expert Marie Lora-Mungai delivered this blunt assessment during our recent African Tech Roundup Podcast conversation, I felt gut-punched.

Our exchange came in the wake of a LinkedIn post Lora-Mungai put out a week ago issuing a stark message to African filmmakers about AI disruption—one that struck uncomfortably close to home. "While you're spending hours in the edit suite, writing grant applications, or attending festivals, AI has already rewritten the script for the entire industry," she warned. The post went viral, precisely because it articulated what many creatives fear but few appear willing to confront.

Senegalese filmmaker Hussein Dembel Sow's response crystallised the paradox facing African creatives: "Across the continent, we're still building the frameworks for modern content industries—film, advertising, media, design. Yet at the same time, those frameworks are being upended in real time by AI. It's not just a disruption. It's a systemic shift unfolding while we're still laying the groundwork."

As someone who, by my own admission, has "probably made more money as a voiceover artist than any one thing" in my eclectic career, Lora-Mungai's message was the proverbial knife that was "halfway in, now going all the way."

Personal confrontation

During our subsequent African Tech Roundup chat, I shared how two European startups had recently approached me about representing my voice in digital marketplaces - platforms designed so that clients would never need me in an actual studio again. I'd turned both down, clinging perhaps to the comfort of traditional practice.

Lora-Mungai didn't sugarcoat her response: "I'm sorry, but I think you're aware your voice talent job is going to disappear."

She's right, of course. My voice - carefully cultivated over years in mainstream media broadcasting and independent publishing - has already been captured in countless hours of public recording. As Lora-Mungai bluntly noted, "Even someone without asking you could go pull your voice from public recording, duplicate it, and then make your own voice say anything."

Adopt and adapt

What's striking is not this reality itself - many of us have been aware of AI's disruptive potential for some time - but rather how we've responded to it. Some African creatives continue treating AI as "some distant Silicon Valley fantasy," with their most sophisticated engagement being, as Lora-Mungai wryly observed, using "ChatGPT as my therapist."

The natural response to disruption is self-preservation. We instinctively try to protect what we've built - the skills we've honed, the workflows we've mastered, the business models that have sustained us. But this mindset is precisely what prevents us from seeing emerging opportunities.

When I reflect on how AI tools have positively augmented my writing and audio production processes, I'm reminded that adaptation isn't merely about survival—it's about enhancement. As Lora-Mungai put it, those who embrace these tools can "multiply your creative output by 10 times, 100 times," enabling individuals to become "their own media or creating machine." However, I'm inclined to not just lean into the prospect of exponential rates of output, but also enhanced levels of quality and depth of content.

Actionable advice

For African creatives specifically, Lora-Mungai's advice is helpfully practical:

• Skip the funding chase: "Don't even waste your time trying to raise money anymore. Just do it." With tools dramatically reducing production costs, many projects that once required significant investment can now be executed with minimal resources.
• Build in public: Rather than developing in isolation, share your work as it evolves. This approach not only builds audiences but also helps attract partners along the way.
• Leverage AI for development: Use conversational AI to refine ideas, develop characters, and sharpen scripts—"You can literally tell ChatGPT, 'Hey, play the role of a veteran filmmaker and help me refine my idea.'"
• Focus on vision, not technical execution: The differentiator now isn't technical skill but creative direction—knowing what you want to achieve and using tools to realise that vision.

While these practical steps can help individual creators adapt, the broader question remains how we collectively respond to these changes on a systemic level.

Opting in

While we must push for regulatory frameworks that protect creative rights - Lora-Mungai suggests blockchain tech might eventually be brought to bear to track the use of our voices, images and other creative assets—waiting for perfect solutions means missing the revolution entirely.

Sow frames this moment with elegant precision: "This isn't about hype. It's about authorship, and power." The conventional language of filmmaking, voice acting, and other creative disciplines increasingly belongs to a paradigm that's rapidly dissolving. What we're witnessing isn't simply the automation of existing practices, but the emergence of entirely new creative possibilities.

As Sow notes, "The real question is: will African creators - filmmakers, designers, copywriters, strategists - use these tools to build something rooted in our own textures, languages, and aesthetics? Or will we remain consumers of formats, styles, and narratives trained elsewhere?"

For those of us who have spent decades honing specific crafts, this transition won't be painless. But clinging to familiar methods while the world transforms around us isn't a strategy - it's a form of creative abdication.

The truly valuable currency in this new landscape isn't technical expertise but creative discernment - what I call "taste" and what Lora-Mungai reluctantly terms "vision" (though I share her discomfort with its self-aggrandising connotations). It's knowing what you want to achieve and directing these powerful tools toward that end.

As someone who stumbled into broadcasting by sneaking into field trips with media students and broke into television through providence and persistence rather than formal training, perhaps I'm uniquely positioned to embrace this shift. After all, one could argue creative disruption (not least by being early to Africa’s podcast revolution) is what gave me a career in the first place.

At this point, I sense that the question isn't whether we'll adapt—it's whether we'll do so intentionally, shaping these tools to serve authentic African storytelling, or whether we'll be relegated to observers as external forces define our creative future.

To borrow Sow's piercing insight: "We're not being replaced. We have the tools. The question is whether we'll use them to shape stories the world hasn't seen yet - or keep trying to fit into ones it already has."

If there's one thing I've learned from two decades in media, it's that there's no point bemoaning the knife that's already sunk in. What matters now is what we choose to carve with it.

Andile Masuku is Co-founder and Executive Producer at African Tech Roundup. Connect and engage with Andile on X (@MasukuAndile) and via LinkedIn.

*** The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Independent Media or IOL.

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