Following an embarrassing false start, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies has set a deadline of early next year for the finalisation of a new draft of the national AI policy.

In April, the department officially withdrew the initial draft after News24 reported that AI-hallucinated sources had been included in the list of references. Minister Solly Malatsi told lawmakers last week that generative AI had been “used irresponsibly during the drafting process” and confirmed that two department officials had been placed on precautionary suspension.

An independent expert review panel, chaired by Professor Benjamin Rosman of the Wits MIND Institute, will now oversee the document before it is reintroduced for public comment.

These latest developments coincided with the launch of Pope Leo XIV’s debut encyclical titled ‘Magnifica Humanitas’, which appeals for AI to be placed at the service of humanity and warns against technologies that foster domination, exclusion and war.

While the humiliation will be hard to erase, the delay provides an opportunity for South Africa to make virtue of necessity. Besides the pope’s document, which raises many issues that domestic policymakers would do well to consider, there is a renewed energy surrounding AI policymaking more generally into which the panel and government should now tap.

The pope’s document, for instance, comes down firmly on the side of the type of regulation that many believe to be urgent, despite the ongoing lobbying of powerful tech leaders against such guardrails. This notwithstanding the fact that AI is already affecting labour markets, is disrupting teaching and learning, is being used to power the algorithms that are said to be driving the misinformation and disinformation influencing election outcomes, is facilitating the surge in cyber theft and fraud, and which is even being used by some militaries to rapidly identify bombing targets.

The free-for-all surrounding social media, meanwhile, is being blamed increasingly for facilitating fatal viral challenges, alongside the cyberbullying that leads to suicide, especially among young users.

In his address at the launch of the papal document, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah highlighted that every AI lab, including Anthropic, operated inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing. “The pressure to stay commercially viable and to stay at the research frontier. Geopolitical pressure. And the older, plainer pressures of pride and ambition. No matter how sincerely any of us intend to do the right thing – and I believe many of us do – we will always be influenced by those incentives.”

The encyclical reinforces this argument by stressing that technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.

Besides internalising this reality, South Africa’s policymakers should also assess the domestic framework against the encyclical’s three criteria for ensuring that the unfolding AI age is human-centric: Is the policy underpinned by transparency and accountability? Does it foster inclusion and access? And what associated measures are there to ensure equity?