Project 01
Current — Honours Dissertation, 2026
Algorithms of Trust
A desktop-based qualitative study examining how South Africa's national AI policy discourse imagines its users, and how that imagined user compares to the narratives South Africans actually produce about AI in public digital spaces.
How do the assumptions about "the user" embedded in South Africa's AI policy discourse compare with the lived narratives and concerns South Africans express about artificial intelligence online — and what happens when those two accounts diverge?
- Why it matters
- Policy that misjudges who its users are and what they can do risks excluding the very people it claims to serve. This project surfaces that gap directly, using South Africa's own recent AI policy process as the case.
- Methods
- Critical discourse analysis (Norman Fairclough)Comparative policy document analysis: 2024 Framework and 2026 Draft PolicyPublic digital narrative collection from South African online spaces
- Findings
- Institutional assumptions about AI users grew more attentive to inequality between the 2024 Framework and the 2026 Draft Policy, but both still presuppose a level of digital literacy and verification capacity that most South Africans do not have. This gap was underscored when the Draft AI Policy itself was withdrawn in April 2026 after it was found to contain AI-hallucinated citations.
- Impact
- A grounded, current case study of the distance between policy imagination and public experience in South African AI governance, with direct relevance to how digital-literacy assumptions shape technology policy more broadly.
- Future implications
- Lays groundwork for the author's planned Master's research extending this line of inquiry into trust between banks, humans, and AI systems.