WGSA Online Session: From Artificial Intelligence to African Intelligence: A Call To Leadership & Solidarity Towards AI Regulation in South Africa

From Artificial Intelligence to African Intelligence: A Call To Leadership & Solidarity Towards AI Regulation in South Africa

The evolution of Artificial Intelligence has led to opportunities and disruption in the creative industry. Feature filmmaking, high-end and low-budget TV, have been “undermined” by large language models, AI-supported image generation, editing applications, text-to-video/audio generative applications, changing how we ideate, write, direct, shoot, design, perform, edit and work. Between doomsayers and Gen-AI, Africa has largely been left out of authentic consultation towards value-sensitive design. Our counterparts in the U.S. and Europe are protected as a result of active protests leading to the promulgation of dedicated binding law. The situation in South Africa is that we are not protected by any code of law, leaving screenwriters and development professionals naked, in the dark, outside, cold and wet. Yes, It’s already here. No, we are not helpless to bring about change. Ultimately, the power rests most intensely in You and I, the choices we make as individuals and as the WGSA, to protect our sacred livelihoods. Fresh from his acclaimed master class at DFM on AI, join Zunaid as we consider why we must protect ourselves from threatening job obsolescence and from the ongoing corporate diminution of what we do as writers. We are holding the very essence of our democracy in our hands, in favour of  human rights, against a nascent, insidious global technocracy which does not appear to care for the intellectual property rights and unique authorial voices of storytellers in Africa.

Session Details

Date: 21 September 2024

Time: 10:00 – 12:00 SAST

Location: Online (The Zoom link will be distributed via email by 8am on 21 September 2024. Please add pdpassistant@writersguildsa.org to your contact list)

Registration closes on 20 September 2024 at 18h00 SAST

Meet your speaker

In 2006, the U.S. and South African governments named Zunaid Mansoor the Amy Biehl awardee as the country’s top Fulbright Scholar – the oldest and flagship exchange program of the U.S. His field of scholarship was not medicine, IT, engineering or politics. It was screen storytelling. He had a vision of the revolution of digital storytelling, powered by mobile tech, and Africa’s role therein. He earned his MFA from multiple Oscar-winning film school, Chapman University in California, and worked for CBS’ The Bold and The Beautiful and for Oscar-nominated producer Alexandra Rose. Then, he returned home, to empower South Africa’s future storytellers, one person at a time.

Between 2010 and now, he served some 10 000 students/mentees as National Head of Screenwriting at AFDA JoBurg, development consultant and story mentor. He also served as a Staff Development Trainer to several screenwriters and filmmakers at AFDA, who have gone on to excel locally and internationally, as lecturers and practitioners.

Zunaid believes in results-driven mentorship. Several of his students/mentees have been nominated and awarded Student Oscars, SAFTA’s, WGSA Muse Awards, KykNet Silwerskerm Awards, and Simon Sabela’s. Several more were selected for the Berlinale Talents in Germany and Durban, for the MultiChoice Talent Factory, and have films/series on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Showmax, SABC, KykNet, DSTV channels, YouTube and TikTok. They are also senior commissioning editors for our continent’s major broadcasters, and are listed in the Mail & Guardian Top 200 Youth may times. Two of his students have won a total of 5 awards at NEFTI during the Durban FilmMart – Africa’s premier short film competition.

He was called “An Aristotle of our time”, for his servant leadership in screenwriting. Zunaid serves as Development and Production Fund Advisor for the NFVF, KZN Toursim and Film Authority, and the PESP Fund. He is also an active Script Editor and Consultant for shorts, features, series, serving live-action, animation and documentary project development processes. He was honoured in 2024 when he was selected to co-facilitate the isiPhethu Screenwriitng Programme during the Durban International Film Festival alongside the legendary, Mr. Edmund Mhlongo. He is a script mentor with the Durban Film Office.

He was appointed on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences committee for South Africa, selecting the feature film/documentary for Oscar nomination. He serves as a judge for the SAFTA’s, the Simon Sabela’s, and for the Writers Guild of South Africa Muse Awards.

An award-winning academic and public speaker, he was invited to the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls where he delivered an analysis of the Oscar-winning Tsotsi. He also guest lectured at the University of Southern California, and Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 2007.

In 2009, his South African-based feature film screenplay was selected to be pitched to the president of Creative Artists Agency, Richard Lovett, in Los Angeles – the world’s largest and most prestigious talent agency. At just 16 and 18, Zunaid was the youngest accredited journalist in the world at both the World AIDS Conference in 2000, and the World Conference Against Racism in KwaZulu Natal, in 2001. He is also a proud alumnus of UKZN where earned law and social sciences degrees cum laude, passing his attorney’s admission exam in 2006.

NB: Registration is essential. WGSA members attend for FREE. Non-members pay ZAR 75.00