IT’S NOT AI BUT HUMAN
…Professor laughs at desperate attempts to launder bribery audio as AI
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I have spoken to a few colleagues who are ICT guys, and they don’t believe that’s AI.
By Mast Reporter
AN ACADEMICIAN has laughed at desperate attempts by the United Party for National Development (UPND) government to sanitise as artificial intelligence (AI) generated the embarrassing audio of a conversation exposing a scheme to sway the outcome of a case in South Africa concerning the burial of Zambia’s former president Edgar Lungu.
The leaked audio, which has gone viral on social media and is receiving extensive mainstream media coverage, consists of a conversation between a known Cabinet minister and an opposition member of Parliament (MP) with very close ties with State House discussing a scheme to bribe and influence the decision of the judge handling the case.
The UPND has since mounted a campaign using State-owned media and UPND allied private media outlets to downplay the audio as a fake generated by AI in a bid to reduce its damage to the public image of the Presidency and the government.
But Professor Naison Ngoma says “the scandalous” audio is technically not anywhere near the description of AI.
Prof Ngoma, a former Copperbelt University (CBU) vice chancellor, said in an interview with The Mast the extents of the audio clip could not be matched with AI.
“There’s a lot which can be done by AI. But to go to the extent to which I saw and heard that clip, you know, I certainly would not believe that it’s AI. No, I wouldn’t,” he said.
Prof Ngoma, a former lieutenant-colonel in Zambia’s armed forces, said it was worrying that people who were adults were now behaving like little children.
“What is sad to me, you know, is big people playing like children. I mean, you don’t expect an ordinary citizen, let alone some fairly well-educated guys to behave like that,” he said.
Prof Ngoma said apart from his personal capacity he had further made consultations with experts in the information technology [IT] community who had dismissed any suggestion that the audio was a product of AI.
“Zambians should not be fooled that the audio was AI [generated]. Even in IT, to believe that kind of argument which is being put across by colleagues out there, it can’t. I certainly don’t believe it’s AI. I have spoken to a few colleagues who are ICT guys, and they don’t believe that’s AI,” he said.
Prof Ngoma said the audio had too many other human variables in it which made it impossible for it to have been AI.
In the audio Mafinga MP Robert Chabinga, who calls himself president of the Patriotic Front (PF) but works with the UPND, is heard boastfully talking, while chewing something, to an attentive and curious Minister of Community Development and Social Services Doreen Mwamba.
He sensationally narrates how he was woken up by State House in the middle of the night and assigned by the “boss” to travel to South Africa to try to bribe the judge handling the judge handling the Lungu burial case in the South African High Court in Pretoria.
Chabinga also explains how he was assigned to organise and fund countrywide protests in Zambia demanding that Lungu be buried back home, as well as hire protesters in South Africa to influence the outcome of the case.
