By Joseph Kwewum
Nigeria is embracing artificial intelligence at a speed that should concern us. Not because AI is inherently dangerous, but because we are adopting it without asking who benefits, who loses, and who is left unprotected when things go wrong.
In just a few years, artificial intelligence has gone from an abstract concept to a daily tool. Nigerian students use it to write assignments, job seekers rely on it to polish CVs, businesses use it to generate adverts and customer responses, and creatives increasingly find themselves competing with machines trained on the very work they once produced. AI has arrived not as a distant future, but as an unregulated present.
Globally, artificial intelligence refers to systems designed to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. The most visible examples today are large language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Grok.
These systems became mainstream in the early 2020s, first through viral demonstrations that exposed their flaws, then through rapid commercial adoption. In Nigeria, where efficiency often determines survival, the appeal was obvious.
AI promised speed, scale, and affordability. But convenience has come at a cost.
In classrooms across the country, teachers are struggling to tell whether students are learning or outsourcing their thinking to machines. The problem is not simply academic dishonesty. It is that AI systems frequently hallucinate, confidently presenting false information as fact. When students rely on these tools without verification, they are not just cutting corners, they are learning inaccuracies. Yet schools lack clear policies, training, or resources to respond effectively.
Powerful tools have been handed over to young people without teaching them how or when to use them responsibly.
The disruption does not stop at education. Nigeria’s creative economy, one of its most resilient and self made sectors, is now under direct threat.
Graphic designers, illustrators, video editors, and photographers are increasingly being undercut by generative AI tools that produce passable content at near zero cost. These systems cannot understand Nigerian culture, nuance, or context, but many clients no longer care.
For businesses focused on speed and price, good enough has replaced good.
This is particularly dangerous in an economy where creative work is already undervalued.
Freelancers who built skills over years now find themselves competing with algorithms trained on massive datasets that include their own work, often without consent or compensation.
The promise of AI efficiency masks a quiet extraction of value from human labour.
There are also serious safety concerns that cannot be ignored. In late 2025, international platforms revealed how easily AI image generation tools could be abused to create non consensual explicit images of women and sexualised content involving children.
While these incidents occurred outside Nigeria, their relevance is immediate.
Nigerian women and minors are equally exposed in a digital space with weak enforcement and slow legal response. When harmful technology spreads faster than regulation, it is the most vulnerable who pay the price.
Misinformation presents another looming threat. AI generated text, images, and videos are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from reality.
In a country already grappling with fake news, election manipulation, and ethnic and religious tensions, generative AI is a powerful accelerant.
Without safeguards, it risks further eroding public trust in institutions, media, and even one another.
Yet Nigeria is also disadvantaged in the global AI race in ways few discussions acknowledge.
Artificial intelligence runs on expensive infrastructure. High performance chips, graphics processing units, and massive data centres are controlled by a handful of countries engaged in their own technological cold war.
As prices rise and access narrows, Nigeria becomes more dependent on foreign platforms it cannot influence or regulate. Nigeria consume AI, but but do not shape it.
Meanwhile, the physical cost of AI is often ignored. Data centres require enormous amounts of electricity and water.
In a country with chronic power shortages and fragile infrastructure, expanding AI capacity without careful planning risks worsening energy strain and environmental stress.
We cannot afford to chase technological prestige at the expense of basic needs.
None of this means Nigeria should reject artificial intelligence. That would be unrealistic and self-defeating.
But embracing AI without strategy is just as dangerous. What we need is intention; clear guidelines for AI use in education; protections for creative workers; and igital safety laws that recognise AI enabled abuse.
Investment in local research, skills training, and infrastructure that reflects Nigerian realities rather than Silicon Valley assumptions.
Artificial intelligence is not neutral. It amplifies the values and priorities of those who build and deploy it.
If Nigeria continues to adopt AI passively, we risk becoming collateral damage in a global race we did not design and cannot win.
The question is no longer whether AI will shape Nigeria’s future. It already is. The real question is whether we will shape it in return.
