A professor of communication and media studies at the University of Ghana, Professor Audrey Sitsofe Gadzekpo, who gave the caution, explained that the large language models that underpinned much of today's A.I. were trained predominantly on Western English language data, which meant they encode the same biases and omissions African communicators had been complaining about.

She said that if AI tools were used uncritically, they risked automating the very stereotypes about Africa that the Western world held about the continent — stereotypes they were trying to dismantle.

“We risk producing African stories that sound, at their core, like they were written by somebody who absorbed a single story.

So, the way forward is not to reject A.I. It is to insist on African participation in the training data, the design, and the governance of this system,” she advised.

Professor Gadzekpo said this in Accra last Tuesday at the inaugural Communicating Africa Summit organised by Africans Communicating Africa, a network of communication practitioners who wish to change the negative narrative of Africa based on Africa’s own experiences and what they believe Africa is.

She said for a long time, Africa had been caught in the currents of negative Western narratives that had circulated through travel journals of colonial explorers, through books such as Joseph Conrad's ‘Heart of Darkness,' through films such as Tarzan, and through an unrelenting stream of news reports about conflict, famine, poverty, and instability.

Describing the negative narratives about Africa as stories told about Africa, without Africa and against Africa, she said they had a profound psychological and economic cost to the negative, crisis-driven, poverty-porn reporting about the continent.

“Psychologically, the dehumanising framing of Africa internalises in our people a colonial mentality and robs us of our dignity. Economically, it creates a risk profile that costs us dearly.

Every story of violence, coups, election upheaval, famine and corruption carries a price tag, my friends. How Western media covers us, disproportionately fixated on instability while ignoring our record of electoral participation, for example.

All of that has a direct and quantifiable impact on our finances and our futures,” she said.

She said the remedy to negative narratives about Africa was not to replace one incomplete story with another, but to tell more stories from diverse perspectives so that no group would be reduced to a fixed stereotypical identity.

The Executive Director of Salt and Light Ministries, Rev. Dr Joyce Aryee, urged the organisers to involve traditional rulers, faith leaders and teachers in their activities as they were the most trusted cultural communicators and custodians of African identity.

The Dufia of Adidome, Togbe Kwasinyi Kakaklolo Agyeman V, said that in the 21st century, any country that could not tell its own story would have its story told by others, and such narratives would not be favourable to them.

The Convenors of the summit, Georgina Asare-Fiagbenu and Nii Commey, said that until Africans themselves tell their own stories, external people would tell their stories for them, and those stories would be incomplete.

They mentioned the activities they intend to organise to change the negative narrative about Africa, including quarterly conversations, case studies, learning and sharing of ideas.