AI Report on Southern Africa http://misa.org Congratulations, Sir, and may other MPs replicate this! According to a report by Zim tech bloggers, Techzim, most of the chatbots on their list have human names, which may make you question why. Bots are intended to be relatable, and the experience should be as human-like as possible. The bloggers added that to enable this, most individuals who create chatbots begin by naming them. They named the banking bots Shona because it was more relatable than giving them a strange English moniker that few people would comprehend. Yes, these are machines, but customers still prefer personal interactions. In November 2018, SMART Harare launched a Facebook chatbot that allows consumers to report non-functioning municipal services. The chatbot SMARTbot is now available at: https://m.me/smartharare, adding various options for reporting and tracking service delivery issues to Harare citizens. AI has touched on everything from personal communication to public discourse. The new technology is entering a new phase with the advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), which can create synthetic text, images, and other media at an unprecedented speed and scale. Large language models LLM, like Open AI, ChatGPT, and Google Bard, are growing in use in the region. LLMs are a type of GenAI that produces naturalistic text outputs in response to an input. ChatGPT and recent tools like Claude and Bard have democratised LLM access, reshaping the general public’s interaction with these technologies. University lecturers at the Johannesburg meeting were worried that their students had started using the models for writing their assignments. Using these models raises concerns about academic integrity and developing critical thinking skills. Furthermore, it may undermine the students’ ability to independently generate original ideas and arguments. At the time of the Johannesburg meeting most universities in the region had not developed mechanisms to deal with such cases of academic dishonesty. Before November 2023, ChatGPT was unavailable in Zimbabwe; users could only access the service through virtual private networks (VPNs) because open AI applications were inaccessible in the country. Health & Social Wellbeing AI apps analysed address a wide range of key health challenges, including non-communicable and communicable diseases, maternity care services, and, most recently, COVID-19 tracking (Owoyemi et al, 2020; CAD4TB, 2022). Key hazards include the processing and security of sensitive health-related personal information and the possibility of bias when using unrepresentative and under-representative data in the creation of AI applications. Use Case: The Corona AI project in Lesotho tests ways for uncovering anti-cancer qualities in existing medications and food that can be utilised to cure viruses using AI. 26