By Odoh Diego Okenyodo
Some conversations can be very touchy to have. Imagine the conversation around artificial intelligence and development communication: one involves removing or minimising human action and the other emphasises human participation. It seems there is war brewing as the holy grail of some profession is being challenged by technological advancement once again!
Development communication and artificial intelligence. These are emerging concepts that nobody really has a clear idea of what they are and how best to define them. It is like how I never know how to distinguish between anthropology and archeology, though I guess one is like history and the other is like biology.
In fact, according to Emmanuel Jegede, a professor of agricultural communication, who talked about development communication, it is a tool in the hands of practitioners, who make of it whatever they want make of it. “Development Communication,” he says, “is amorphous” and “acephalous” which is big grammar to day it is defined or does not have a clear head or tail. If I’m writing about two things that have no head or tail I’m sure you are tempted to stop reading now but you shouldn’t stop because of the things I’m about to say.
Firstly why would you read 198 words of a newspaper column article and decide that you wouldn’t want to read more. That’s a travesty do you know what it took me to write all of these. So you need to read on this is the first reason you have to read. Another reason is that when you think of artificial intelligence you may be thinking of some robots and other machines that do some work or thinking of Doctor Who and all those science fiction movie but that’s not what AI is all about.
Mr Samuel Osime, Director of Publication and Research at the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies Kuru defines development communication as using communication to support development. “It is communication that involves stakeholder engagement and promotes sustainable development,” the PhD Scholar Osime explained. And Solomon Kwakfut, a fellow PhD Scholar encapsulates that more succinctly as, “Communication for the people, by the people and with the people.” For development communication practitioners and scholars, everything is about the people and their participation; participatory method is their blood group.
Imagine as you hear these from the development communication army, the army of believers in human participation and then you hear what I am about to narrate next from the AI battalion. For them, words like “machine intelligence”, “machine learning”, and “reduce human intervention” are anathema. How dare you remove humans from anything meant for them?!
“AI is used to automate tasks, so that it can be carried out without human intervention.” You could feel the discomfort among the development communicators in the room when Prof Uche Mbanaso, Executive Director of the Centre for Cyberspace Studies (CCS) at Nasarawa State University, Keffi. All these were happening two days ago at the closing session of the 4th Conference on Communication and Development in Africa. The army was ready for battle, and no one less than the professor of participatory agricultural communication, Prof Emmanuel Jegede, could lead the charge.
Related Posts
Jegede interrogated the AI army like a lawyer cross examining a witness. “You said, ‘AI can take autonomous decisions’?” He served that question with the stern look of ‘Answer-me-and-wait-for-what-is-about-to-hit-you”. The AI force answered in the affirmative. Then Jegede made his point: “What we can do to make AI more productive is the tendency and proclivity of AI to build capacity. If it is meant for the people, how can it be used to teach the people how it works?” He gave examples of farmers that have maintained some practices for decades and need to learn new ways and methods. The AI army agreed to explore how AI can help in building capacity in agricultural communication.
“What drives AI is data,” argues the AI army. In that point could seem like an opportunity for some rapprochement between the sides, which is that AI takes decisions faster because “it is the brains of many people backed by big data and algorithms.” In that sense, it can be said to be participatory, isn’t it? Well… somehow… Does harvesting our thoughts and processing it alone without our involvement really amount to participation? Even if that consultation is considered participation, is that the best form of participation possible? You could say AI consults the brains of many, but if it makes decisions on its own without human input, as the AI army seems to imply, then AI does not constitute participation in the development process. Maybe routine tasks that consume the efforts of development communication practitioners can be automated to allow for time and mental bandwidth to process professional actions.
The last part of the previous paragraph is the key opening for AI to be used in development communication. Practitioners of development communication are having to expend a disproportionate amount of time on routine tasks that include fundraising, marketing, monitoring and evaluation, report writing, accounting, and human resource management. These are important for accountability and sustainability, but they are painful distractions. I know because, whenever I have to log into those banking apps to approve staff salaries or generate financial reports, I feel like I am being made to pay ransoms. If these tasks could all become automated in some form, they would free development communicators adequate time for more meaningful professional practice and engagement.
If you check on services like Proposal Genie (which “uses AI to draft perfect proposals in no time. You don’t have to spend hours writing and proofreading every proposal you send out”) and Proposal AI (which provides you intelligent suggestions like where to cut off in your proposal if data suggests that the client approves proposals of certain length, or not to give them price options), you will see opportunities for collaboration between AI and devcom. There is also Rytr, a service that helps you write almost anything but allows you to interact with its own suggestions and change them in any way or direction you please.
What of use of AI in monitoring and evaluation of development communication projects? Qlick defines big data analytics as “the use of processes and technologies, including AI and machine learning, to combine and analyse massive datasets with the goal of identifying patterns and developing actionable insights.” When you add the natural language processing capabilities of AI (which makes computers recognise everybody’s speech, including Naira Marley’s voice); facial recognition (which can let me know exactly how many unique participants attended the rallies of rival political parties in the last election), and AI’s ability to differentiate two objects, a lot is possible.
AI is an opportunity for M&E of development communication and it is a huge one, firstly because there is an ever-expanding need for the practice and practitioners as the world becomes richer but has more poor people; and secondly because the emphasis on the participatory process appears to detract from rigorous M&E in devcom as observed in other areas of development when development communication is placed beside them.
Of course, introducing AI into development communication seems to be encouraging plagiarism, like concepts and contexts, and these are reasons for research and publication experts like Mr Osime to worry. But, everything in this world is becoming a cause for worry. In fact, I am worried that this subject is becoming too serious for my regular readers, especially those I blackmailed earlier to read up to this point. For this reason, I am seriously going to plant a full stop shortly and ask you to go google up the topics and see where you fit.
If you agree with me or not, send me a Telegram on @TheOkenyodo. We can be talking development communication and all these things.
