Presidency dismisses claims President Cyril Ramaphosa’s speech was ‘written’ by Artificial Intelligence

President Cyril Ramaphosa. Picture: Khaya Ngwenya / Independent Newspapers

President Cyril Ramaphosa. Picture: Khaya Ngwenya / Independent Newspapers

Published Nov 28, 2023

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The Presidency has dismissed allegations that a recent speech by President Cyril Ramaphosa was written by Artificial Intelligence (AI) or AI-sourced.

In a series of posts shared on X, YouTuber Roman Cabanac claimed that Ramaphosa’s November 21 speech was written by ChatGPT, a language model-based chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022.

One of the posts showed a screen shot from scribbr.com where a portion of the speech was checked and it showed an 89% probability that the speech was generated by the AI tool.

— Bloody Aardvark (@AardvarkBloody) November 23, 2023

Spokesperson in the Presidency, Vincent Magwenya said the Presidency does not use AI tools to write speeches.

According to News24, Magwenya added that snippets in Ramaphosa's speech were supplied by the Department of Education.

Magwenya confirmed that a probe was under way and that action would be taken if it was proven that AI tools were used to write the speech.

In March, IOL reported on how AI has taken the world by storm and is developing at an exponential rate.

Within two months ChatGPT reached 100 million users and overtook all previous app growth records. The implications of the versatile ChatGPT are far-reaching, with many people becoming concerned about their profession, while academic institutions are rethinking their assessment strategies.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is embedding ChatGPT in many of its products, such as Bing, Azure, Excel and Word.

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