South Africa’s National AI Policy Framework lands as the economics of culture are being renegotiated by technology. For investors, operators and market-watchers in the creative economy, the framework’s core commitment, placing artificial intelligence within a wider programme of digital transformation and pledging ethical, inclusive and responsible development, raises a pointed commercial question: who captures the value that generative AI systems extract from music, film, broadcasting, publishing, performance and design?
Those sectors are more than revenue generators. They preserve language, memory and identity, and they supply the recordings, images, text and cultural patterns on which generative AI models are trained. If South Africa wants an AI ecosystem aligned with its people, the creators who produce that training material must hold a meaningful role in deciding how it is used. As the country moves from framework to implementation, the creative economy should be treated as a governance priority rather than an afterthought.
The financial stakes are concrete. Unesco’s 2026 global creativity report warns that generative AI could deepen inequalities and contribute to significant revenue losses for music and audiovisual creators. Those forecasts are not destiny, but they signal the need to act before market practices harden into norms favouring the largest rights holders and technology companies over individual creators and small enterprises.
The challenge is not to stop experimentation. AI can help independent artists develop ideas, manage catalogues, reach audiences and reduce administrative burdens. The real task is distinguishing authorised assistance from extraction and impersonation, and building the operating systems that make that distinction enforceable.
Most responsible-AI frameworks contain familiar principles: transparency, fairness, accountability, privacy and human oversight. Those principles matter, but a creator facing an unauthorised voice clone needs more than a statement of values. That person needs to know who generated the material, what account distributed it, whether relevant evidence will be preserved, how to request removal and where to appeal if the first decision is wrong. That is the difference between ethics as aspiration and governance as an operating system, and it is the standard by which South Africa’s implementation work should be judged, especially for creators who lack the resources of a major label, broadcaster or technology company.
Four protections could be built now. The first is meaningful consent for commercial digital replicas, with permission specific about purpose, duration, territory, modification, transfer and compensation. Contracts should not bury synthetic-use rights in vague language that a performer cannot reasonably evaluate. The second is provenance: providers and commercial deployers should support reliable records identifying when media has been generated or materially altered by AI. Provenance will never be perfect, but it can make authorised uses easier to verify and deceptive uses easier to investigate. The third is accessible redress, with platforms and distributors maintaining a standardised complaints process for impersonation and unauthorised use, including evidence preservation, human review, deadlines, an appeal mechanism and safeguards against fraudulent takedown requests. The fourth is cultural-sector AI literacy, giving artists and small creative businesses practical education in licensing terms, data privacy, content credentials, collective-management options and the points at which professional legal advice becomes necessary.
Government procurement and public funding can convert these protections into market expectations. AI services used by departments, broadcasters, schools and cultural institutions should be required to document data practices, security controls, human oversight and complaint procedures. Grants supporting AI-enabled cultural projects should budget for rights clearance, community participation and provenance rather than treating those activities as optional administration.
Meanwhile, South Africa could establish a small number of supervised pilots across music, broadcasting and multilingual publishing, testing consent records, authorised voice models, content credentials and rapid complaint handling with real creators and small enterprises. Independent evaluation should ask whether the tools work for people with limited money, bandwidth and legal support, not only whether they satisfy large institutions. Results should be published in plain language so creators, policymakers and developers can see which safeguards succeed, which fail and what must change before wider deployment.
The regional context reinforces the commercial case. The African Union’s Continental AI Strategy calls for a people-centred, development-oriented and inclusive approach while preserving African culture, and South Africa can demonstrate what that commitment looks like in a sophisticated creative market with multiple languages, histories and unequal access to power. Implementation should include independent creators, unions and guilds, collecting societies, broadcasters, universities, cultural institutions, technologists and representatives of language communities, with a practical task: developing model consent clauses, data documentation expectations, provenance guidance, complaint procedures and indicators showing whether smaller creators can actually use the system. A related argument on these questions appears at https://mg.co.za/thought-leader/2026-10-22-do-not-let-ai-steal-our-culture/.
South Africa can pursue AI growth while refusing a model in which cultural value is collected from many and controlled by a few. The strongest framework will be one that makes innovation possible, consent visible, accountability enforceable and participation broad enough to reflect the country itself. Whether implementation can turn that market logic into enforceable rights for smaller creators remains the open question of the next phase.
Michael Neely, a veteran music executive, songwriter, author, educator and keynote speaker with more than four decades of experience in music and entertainment, and CEO of Global Music Conference and XS10 Magazine, focuses on responsible AI, creator rights, copyright, education and creative industry transformation.