In a twist of fate that a certain Canadian cult hero would find ironic, one of the few things I do believe in happens to be artificial.
Ghosts, gods, 80-year old Elvis.
Life on Mars, monsters in lochs, manufactured moon landings.
Led Zeppelin that plays backwards, turmeric that cures Covid.
None of these things are proven to be real, but many people believe them. As a reformed catholic, a light-hearted heretic, and one-time viewer of the King’s corpse, I am not one of them. In a twist of fate that a certain Canadian cult hero would find ironic, one of the few things I do believe in happens to be artificial.
AI has been around for an entire age.
Contrary to popular lore, it didn’t miraculously appear as if from nowhere when OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022. Even when we built Helm Engine in 2016, artificial intelligence (in its early forms) had already been around for years.
There’s debate as to who first ‘invented’ it – it’s not as clearcut as the lightbulb or the Big Mac. But whether it was Turing or Minsky or Simon or Hinton, you can bet they weren’t sitting behind their computers, clasping their hands and laughing evil laughs while plotting the downfall of the human workforce.
AI was created for good, and should be used as such.
Fast forward to 2026, and AI has wormed its way into every corner of the digital world, thanks mainly to the Large Language Model. Not only do our mothers now know what it is, they use it to write excessively punctuated WhatsApp messages to the neighbourhood watch.
AI is – to make it unpoetically plain – everywhere.
For AI doubters, it is the very worst of times.
For believers like myself though, it is the best.
And with every release and every feature and every Wow! moment, the gap between the two sides of the AI divide is becoming more and more Dickensian.
Ask anyone on one side of the tale, and AI is the worst thing to happen since social media. It’s taking jobs, causing brain rot, and giving people appendages they didn’t ask for. It’s hallucinating, teaching youths to cook meth, and telling even the stupidest people how smart they are for asking that insightful question. I know I’m slightly biased here, but I get the feeling that these are the same people who still read the paper and stockpiled tinned goods in 1999.
The brave souls who've dared to explore the rather ‘treacherous’ territory of artificial intelligence know the opposite to be true.
I am fortunate enough to be a part of an organisation that embraced AI many years ago, when it was still a Spielberg movie. When we started our AI journey in 2016, there was very little information about what it was, who it served, and whether or not it would still be a thing in five years’ time. For all we knew, it could’ve turned out to be another metaverse (RIP). We didn’t have answers, but we had a can-build attitude and a tech team prepared to boldly go where few South African companies had gone before.
Ten years later, Helm is proud to be a managed AI partner for some of Africa’s biggest enterprises, where we connect over 1.5 million users every month to the services they need in order to live their lives. And we do it in any South African language because everyone should have the right to communicate in their mother tongue.
That is using AI for good.
Can it be used for evil and for real-world losses? Of course it can. But in the same way that poppies can produce drugs, democracy can dish up a Trump administration, and guitars can be used to make Nickelback songs. The difference between AI for good and AI for evil is a matter of intention – for those who make the technology, and those who buy it. We can’t speak for all tech companies and we certainly can’t speak for all users. But we can speak for ourselves.
Belief in artificial intelligence is not a question of existence. (It’s real, promise.) It’s a matter of purpose, power, and using that power for good. So perhaps the question shouldn’t be whether or not you believe in AI. The question is whether you believe in its ability to make a positive impact.
As Helm, we definitely do.
We believe in its power.
And its ability to improve the human experience.
That’s what wakes me up in the morning, keeps me going during the day, and has me waxing evangelical about the magic of artificial intelligence.
