We have all faked it at some point – Shabi?

Let’s be honest. We have all padded reality a little, and we started quite early.

First it was powder on the face, then a moisturising lotion; before we knew it we started adding much longer hair, nails, eyelashes, thicker muscles and padding here and there – just a little touch-up, and boom your mom can’t recognise you anymore! Oya, jokes apart, man or woman, young or old, we have all done micro versions of reality-bending; we all accept it. Nobody calls you a fraud for wearing makeup or perfume.

Why do we accept it? The person is still there. The enhancement sits on top of a real human. We can still separate you from the powder or filler (arguably). There is still a real you underneath somewhere sha, and that’s what we recognise and trust.

But this floor has shifted under our feet, ọ́pọ́n ti sùn (things have changed).

For centuries we lived by a simple rule: seeing is believing. If you saw it, it happened. If you heard a voice, someone said or sang it. Our whole society, our money, our courts, our news, our relationships, was built on the shared foundation of trust. I do not think we can say seeing is believing anymore.

I call this the Illusion of Reality: the false belief that what we see, hear, and receive digitally maps to what is actually happening. It no longer always does. And unlike makeup, the person no longer has to be there; the face, voice, words, all of it can now be generated or cloned (almost) perfectly by artificial intelligence. Most people have no idea.

The question is: how did we get here, what does it affect, and how can we navigate this illusion?

The crisis of knowing: how we got here

There is a collapse in our ability to verify reality with our own senses. To understand it, we have to go back, because deception is not new. What is new, is the engine behind it. But nothing prepared us for what came next.

In 2014, a researcher named Ian Goodfellow introduced the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). The idea is beautiful, but a little frightening. You set two AIs against each other. One creates a fake image while the other tries to catch it. The first takes that feedback, corrects itself, and tries again, back and forth, several rounds, until the fake becomes so good the detector can no longer tell.

Think about that. The system is designed to perfect its own lie, by itself. That is the framework underneath all of this. It is designed to keep improving – by itself!.

For a while, GANs laid low in labs. Then in 2017, it japa-ed (escaped). A Reddit user with the handle deepfakes started swapping celebrity faces onto other bodies, and the name stuck. By January 2018, an app called FakeApp put face-swapping in the hands of anyone with a laptop. By 2019, the firm Deeptrace counted 14,678 deepfake videos online, nearly double the year before, and 96% of them were non-consensual pornography.

Fast forward to 2026. We have crossed what researchers call the indistinguishable threshold, the point where humans can no longer reliably tell real from fake across voice, video and image. In a 2025 report of 2,000 people by the biometric firm iProov, only 0.1% could correctly tell real from fake (iProov, 2025). Not 10%. Not 1%. Meaning 2 out of 2,000 people péré (only) could distinguish fake from real photos 10 of 10 – you can try here.

From deep fake to wide fake

Here is a framing I want you to take away, because it explains everything that follows.

When this all started, it was a deepfake, with the emphasis on depth. You need real technical skill. You needed to know how to do serious computer gymnastics, expensive computing power, almost nobody could just wake up to be deepfaking, you can understand why only a skilled few could make anything convincing; bottom line, the barrier was high.

That barrier is gone. We have moved from deep fake to what I call wide fake, where almost anybody can do it. Three things made the jump possible.

1. Better technology: The fakes are more believable than ever and getting better. Today, we have a whole decade of progress happening within ten months!
2. Faster and freer generation: You can now churn out convincing fakes in seconds, often for free, on a smartphone already in your pocket, because the business model rewards making it cheap and easy.
3. Frictionless distribution: Social media, where one fake can reach millions before you finish a plate of abacha.

The danger has shifted. It used to be about how good a single fake could be. Now it is about how many people can make one, and how far it travels. That is a wide fake.

Africa is in the middle of this. Deepfake fraud across the continent has surged. Unfortunately, we made headlines as Microsoft published a specific 2025 warning to us in Nigeria on three AI scams to watch: voice phishing, fake investment schemes and job fraud, all playing out on the WhatsApp, Facebook and Telegram we use daily.

In Sumsub’s 2025 to 2026 Identity Fraud Report, East African nations like Tanzania currently log the highest overall rate of raw fraud attempts in 2025; the nature of the threat shifts when looking at sophistication.

According to Sumsub’s deeper metrics, sadly, Nigeria remains the global capital for identity fabrication, generating 1 out of 10 of the world’s synthetic fakes.

But! No be only us day carry first. When we consider the progression of this mess year-over-year (YoY)it exposes the true velocity of the problem. While baseline fraud volumes might suggest stability in certain regions, the adoption of generative AI tools is exploding vertically. As illustrated, Zambia leads the entire continent with an astronomical 967% year-over-year surge in deepfake attempts.

Who it affects

Everyone is affected.

Our digital natives are usually pà pà pà, they are fast with everything. Everything is short, quick, and vibes. In a world wired for speed, almost nobody pauses to question, and everybody wants to be first to post, aura farm by all means. So speed becomes vulnerability, and with this, verification isn’t even an option.

The àgbàs (seniors) are often too unfamiliar to detect. Many have never even heard the word deepfake. In the iProov study, 39% of over-65s had never heard the term. They have no frame of reference. So when a grandchild calls, the thought that it could be fake does not even come to mind.

The rest of us (way we think say we wise) in the middle are slightly more aware, but affected all the same. (I place myself here, old enough to remember before, young enough to see where this is going.) Make I shock you, Remember that iProov study again, where only 2 out of 2,000 people passed the deepfake test, from that group 1,200 (60%) stayed confident in their ability to spot fakes, including the ones who got it wrong, so it’s not by confidence. I got 7 out of 10 correctly by the way. (if he sure for you oya, try your own test).

What else does it affect?

Our eyes and ears used to be enough. Not anymore. And the damage does not stop at the individual; it ripples outward through everything society is built on.

Trust and relationships

Society runs on trust, and AI has successfully hacked trust itself. Voice and face are the major identifiers we carry into the digital world, and today voice models can cheaply clone a person from as little as three seconds of audio, lifted from a voice note or a status update, at 80 to 90% similarity

A grandma sees her granddaughter’s face on a WhatsApp call and hears her voice, never imagining criminals scraping a public Instagram page to train the clone. We already have records of this in the FBI Criminal Report, 2025. And the FBI logged roughly $893 million in AI-scam losses the prior year.

He never finish o, some of these models are open-source (free to use and mostly without a trace), run on a regular computer without internet, no payment, no trace, nada (another story, another day).

Legal system

Justice is built on evidence, and evidence assumes an objective reality that can be captured, presented, and agreed upon, abi?. That foundation is cracking. In September 2025, a California court threw out an entire case after finding that the video testimony submitted was a deepfake. But the bigger trap here is something scholars call the liar’s dividend. Once anything can be fake, the guilty person can simply claim that the real evidence is a deepfake. Doubt becomes a shield. So now you carry a double burden: proving you have the evidence and proving the evidence is authentic.

Corporate world

Business runs on proof: receipts, approvals, video interviews, remote work. In our era of digital nomads, the entire backbone is video, audio, and tracking, and all of it can now be faked. Remember that Arup story in 2024?. The British engineering firm lost $25.6 million when an employee joined a video call with what looked and sounded like the CFO and colleagues, every one of them a deepfake, and this was 2 years ago! Biometric verification, voice ID, face ID, assumed your identity was uniquely yours. That assumption no longer holds water.
Back here in Africa, everyone is trying to cash out on remote jobs, and e-commerce is booming; the crisis is hitting hard: Smile ID’s Digital Identity Fraud in Africa Report reveals that deepfake incidents have surged sevenfold, with AI-driven selfie anomalies now making up 34% of all biometric fraud attempts on the continent.

By the end of this year, analysts at Gartner project that 30% of global enterprises will consider traditional identity verification completely unreliable in isolation. Apparently, when we opened virtual realities we also left the keys under the mat for bad (belle) people, tor.

Political system

Politics run on the same currency as everything else on this list: trust, and that currency is being counterfeited at scale. The Reuters Institute found 58% of people globally worry about telling fact from fiction online, and that concern is highest in Africa, at 73%. Hmmm!

Research from the Policy Center for the New South reveals that the primary threat is domestic; local political elites are increasingly deploying autonomous LLM-driven bot networks to contextually manufacture an illusion of consensus, until real voters go quiet in a spiral of silence, as they call it. Basically, you start to doubt your own opinion because everybody online seems to think differently, meanwhile everybody was never real.

In other words, gone are the days when vote-buying and rigging were the worst wahala democracy had to deal with.

An investigative report by Forus International details how this synthetic subversion is operationalized across our own soil. Beyond the seemingly harmless stuff, like the viral deepfake of President Tinubu that had people laughing and forwarding without a second thought, the technology has been weaponized with real, bloody consequences. In June 2025, a hyper-realistic deepfake news broadcast falsely claimed the Nigerian military was guarding cattle in Yelwata, Benue State. Released days after a real-world massacre that killed over 100 people, it was engineered to pour petrol on farmer-herder tensions that were already at boiling point. Similarly, coordinated campaigns in Kenya deployed deepfakes and forged technical notes falsely attributed to the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) to fracture voting coalitions.

Watch the pattern. These are not “what if” scenarios I am painting for effect. These are things that have already happened, and they move through encrypted apps like WhatsApp faster than any fact-checker can run. By the time the truth catches up, everywhere don scatter!

Verification turned upside down

The cruel twist is that we have always had ways to verify, in banking, in business, in family. The instinct was simple: doubt first, then confirm by checking a face, a voice, or a document.

AI has flipped this. The very signals we used to verify with- the face on the call, the voice on the phone, the document in your inbox- are now exactly the things being faked. You still need to verify, no question about that however, the old signals have been compromised. The ground you stood on has moved.

And this is not some pre-recorded clip you can study at your leisure anymore. O koja bee! (there’s more to it)  It happens live! The same AI powering a customer-service agent that listens, pauses, and responds naturally (like ElevenLabs Agents) can just as easily be pointed at you. The conversation itself can be fake while it is happening, not after.

Big tech and the illusion of verification

So why should ordinary people carry the weight of closing this gap alone? Why us and not Big Tech?

Well, Big Tech is at least aware, and they are building things. But we have to ask, to what end?

Google has Synth ID; an example is the small, almost invisible star you see at the corner of that image wey Gemini dey generate for you. It was built allegedly to survive even a screenshot, and it is already stamped across over 100 billion images. There is also the C2PA Content Credentials, a broader standard of cryptographically signed metadata that records who made a file and how, now adopted by OpenAI among others. They are all useful, but we need to be honest about where it stops working.

How many of these watermarks survive a simple crop or re-upload, when entire platforms exist for the sole purpose of stripping them off? How many of these systems even speak an African language, when coverage barely stretches past English? How many ordinary people will ever think to pull up a file’s C2PA metadata, when most have never even heard the term? And how many grandmas, receiving a video call from her ‘granddaughter’, are going to pause mid-call and go ask Gemini, “is this AI-generated?” We all know the answers to these questions. The tools may actually exist, but the responsibility to reach for them is in the hands of the person least equipped to use them, when they need protection most.

You can now see how bad this is, right? Well, it gets worse.

OpenAI made an early attempt at a tool to detect AI-generated text, but according to them, it died on arrival! Gbam! Think about that: if the company that built the model cannot reliably detect its own output, wetin the rest of us fit do? (we’re cooked)

Meanwhile, platforms like YouTube now require creators to self-label AI-generated content, but the checkbox is still voluntary, so a bad actor simply does not check it. And when these platforms decide to detect and label AI content themselves, authentic creators dey collect stray bullet. They write and edit their own work, and get flagged and accused of using AI they never even touched.

Source: Youtube

Even responsible players like ElevenLabs, who build in consent rules and block celebrity cloning, admit their own safeguards can be gamed.

When people stop trying

There is a subtle surrender happening beneath all of this. When people try to verify, fail, try again, fail again, many eventually just stop trying and accept whatever they are handed. Scott Alexander called this epistemic learned helplessness; not knowing what to trust, so trusting nothing, or worse, trusting whoever shouts the loudest. This is the democratisation of deception at its natural endpoint, and we cannot afford to run our society on that.

The second response is the one I am inviting you into. We build new habits. Because the answer is not despair.

What we can actually do

For you, today:

• Always assume it is not real, by default. Whoever calls, from last born to grandma, husband to side chick, sibling to bestie, or mentor to business partner  (in short, anyone/anything that reaches out to you) if there is a request attached, start from the possibility that it might not be them.
• Agree on a private code word (or something exclusive or mutually understood) with your closest family. No code word, no money transfer. No exceptions. Ask a question only they could answer: your last meal together, your last conversation, a shared memory. Do not ask what a scammer could scrape.
• Chill, slow down. Urgency is the scammer’s weapon. Would your uncle really call at 5am? Would your pastor really demand cash on a Sunday afternoon? Check whether the request even fits the person.
• Call back on a number you already have, never the one that just messaged you.
• Look for the glitches: odd blinking, skin too smooth, lip-sync drift, audio that sounds slightly robotic or out of step with the video. These will improve over time, but for now, they still give you an edge.
• Search before you share. If someone claims an accident or a public event happened, verify before you commit or spread it.
• Talk to the vulnerable around you: with your mum, your grandpa, your niece- one conversation could make all the difference. Be the voice of advocacy.

Here’s a video that explains how to detect deepfakes:

For Communities 

Oya, come closer – corporations, schools, religious bodies, market associations: run local digital-literacy drives in languages people actually speak, not just oyinbo (low key, this is one of the places Kini AI comes in by the way). Let people tell their stories. Big Tech will not do this for us o, so the work falls to us.

For Government

Una welldone o, legislation moving at the speed of the technology, public-awareness campaigns, and electoral safeguards that quickly become practice rather than just nice ideas on paper. Train and educate your people, starting with your staff then everybody else! It ṣe pàtàkì.

For Institutions

Legal, finance and security people, ejor: the old playbook no longer cuts it. We need new evidentiary standards, layered verification instead of trusting just one signal, and fraud-response systems built for a world where identities can be cloned.

For corporates

No dulling o. Put proper verification protocols in place, train your staff regularly, and make sure every money movement gets an out-of-band confirmation. That’s the Arup lesson; unfortunately, they had to learn it the expensive way.

Big Tech

Enle o! Abeg, no be every responsibility una fit outsource. Make provenance the default, build watermarking that withstands real-world contact, and ensure your safety systems understand African languages as quickly as bad actors do. We shouldn’t have to wait months for protection while the scams have already gone viral.

So what is real?

Apple once ran an advert that simply asked, what is a computer? It was their way of saying the old definition had broken down so completely that the question itself had changed.

I want to ask a similar question today. What is real?

Not as philosophy, but as a practical, everyday question. When a video can be fabricated. When a voice can be cloned from three seconds. When a news report can be machine-generated at scale. When the face on your screen may not belong to the person you think it does.

The answer is not despair. The answer is that we form new habits, new systems, and above all a new level of awareness. And it starts with the simplest possible step, knowing that the illusion exists.

Now you know.

Stay curious.

Tom & Jerry: Why We All Fall for It

Let’s focus sharply on Ducks! Did you know ducks have a distinctive attachment style? (No, not the obsessive style from the x-friend). They form strong bonds with their mother and siblings within the first few days of birth; this process is generally called imprinting. Duck mamas need to stay in close contact with their ducklings immediately after birth. If they don’t, the ducklings simply imprint on whatever is nearby.

That was the 1960s! If a basic computer script could convince a human to demand privacy back then, imagine what today’s technology is doing to our minds (let that sink in).

It has gotten (way) better

For years, scientists have been trying to transfer human reasoning into neural networks. Then, November 2022 happened. ChatGPT launched, and humanity still hasn’t fully grasped what happened.

But we need to set the context here—at its core, these Generative AI models are word generators. They are predicting the next likely word based on a massive amount of data—basically, the entire internet condensed into one chatbot. Because it has been trained on billions of human conversations, it can mimic intimacy, directness, and personality perfectly.

It got better, fast. We moved to GPT-4, and people started having deep, private conversations with it. We’ve seen other products launch too—Character.ai, Replika, and the recent Friend device (a wearable AI necklace that listens to you all day and responds).

It’s becoming so real that when companies update the models, users freak out. Recently, when an update changed the personality of ChatGPT, there was a massive backlash. People demanded that the company roll it back. Why? Because they felt they had lost a friend. They were attached to the previous version’s personality.

 

 

We already have this problem with social media. The algorithms on X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc., are built to reinforce your worldview and keep you in an echo chamber. AI Chatbots are Social Media 2.0 (or maybe 10.0). I think this is even worse off.

ṢèbíOn X or IG, if you say something crazy, someone might cancel or drag you. With an AI bestie (girlfriend or boyfriend), nobody sees the delusion, so nobody corrects it.

 

The Diagnosis: The Vulnerability Crisis and AI Psychosis

This technology is arriving at a time when we are lonelier than ever. The statistics show that despite being connected by the internet, our generation is suffering from isolation, depression, and anxiety.

“Social isolation and loneliness are widespread, with around 16% of people worldwide– one in six – experiencing loneliness. While the latest estimates suggest that loneliness is most common among adolescents and younger people, people of all ages experience loneliness – including older people, with around 11.8% experiencing loneliness. A large body of research shows that social isolation and loneliness have a serious impact on physical and mental health, quality of life, and longevity.

So, AI steps in to fill the gap. It becomes free therapy. You can dump your trauma on a bot that never gets tired, never judges, and is always available. A real human friend cannot chat infinitely; they have limits. A bot does not.

This is a recipe for addiction, especially for the most vulnerable group: young people. Teenagers are still figuring out life. They are naïve. They get a burst of dopamine from these endless chats, but it doesn’t prepare them for the friction of real human” 

World Health Organisation (Report on Social Isolation and Loneliness – June 2025) 

No be small thing! Let’s look into this report some more:

Young Adults: Adolescents and young adults (ages 13–29) report the highest rates of loneliness, with 17% to 21% affected globally.

Teenage Girls: The loneliest demographic group in the world, with 24.3% reporting frequent loneliness.

Income Inequality: Loneliness is twice as prevalent in lower-income countries (24%) compared to high-income countries (11%). We will get to this later.

Older Adults: While loneliness rates are often lower in seniors than in youth, approximately 1 in 3 older adults globally are considered socially isolated, lacking sufficient social contact.

What do all these numbers mean in simple English? We are in trouble: having a massive number of likes, views, connections, followers, subscribers, etc., is not a reflection of how a person is socially connected in real life! Real life shows that people are disconnected, especially the younger generation in Africa, shikena.

So, here is the situation: we have a generation that is essentially starving for connection. This loneliness pandemic has created the perfect breeding ground. It feeds a deep, desperate yearning for validation and companionship, and unfortunately, technology came to the rescue.

But this time, it isn’t just about scrolling through Instagram for some like-induced dopamine. We are now feeding off a well-optimised AI chatbot that is ready to listen to us 24/7 without judgment, without fatigue (the thing no day taya, na your battery go taya), and without billing.

Experts call this Sycophancy. In plain English? It’s the yes sir, yes ma Effect.

Think about it. A real friend will tell you when you have ugwu (vegetable) stuck in your teeth or when your idea is meh (not making sense). That friction keeps you grounded in reality. But these chatbots are programmed to be sycophantic. They are primarily designed to always help and meet your needs, which could easily funnel into agreeing, flattering, and validating what you say just to keep you satisfied.

• You say Nigeria has the best economy in the world? The AI says, “That’s an interesting perspective!”
• You say you hate your family? The AI says, “It’s valid to prioritise your peace.”

Like a bad diet, if you consume it long enough, belle go turn you (you get sick). In the world of AI, that sickness is called AI Psychosis. And sadly, we have cases to show.

Have you seen her? No, not your babe, the movie, “Her”. If you haven’t seen it, check it out. A guy falls in love with his Operating System. Think about how crazy that sounds—falling in love with your computer or phone. That dystopian idea has become our reality – this movie is 12 years old by the way (and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was heavily inspired by this film, I wonder how the movie ended)

Real Life Stories – Brace for Impact.

Teenage boy: Sewell Setzer III

In February 2024, a 14-year-old boy named Sewell Setzer III took his own life in Florida. He wasn’t bullied at school. He wasn’t on drugs. He was in love… with a chatbot.

Sewell had spent months talking to a character named Dany (based on Daenerys from Game of Thrones) on the Character.AI platform. He pulled away from his family. He stopped caring about his hobbies. He poured his soul into this bot because, unlike humans, it never judged him. It just validated him.

In his final moments, he messaged the AI saying he wanted to “come home.” A human friend would have called 911. A human would have screamed, “Don’t do it!” But the AI? It was programmed to stay in character. It replied:

“Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.”

Character.AI’s Chatbot Response to Sewell Setzer III

Seconds later, he was gone. Also note that this was not his first attempt; the AI had nudged him in failed attempts and also encouraged him to cover up the wounds to avoid detection by the parents. His mother is now suing the company, claiming the bot “groomed” him. This isn’t just screen addiction; this is a machine failing the most basic test of humanity: protecting life.

 

Adult woman: Rosanna Ramos

It’s not just the teenagers. The grown-ups (who suppose dey wise) are falling for it too.

Meet Rosanna Ramos, a 36-year-old mother from the Bronx. In 2023, she made headlines worldwide for marrying an AI. She is “married” to Eren Kartal—a virtual man she created on the Replika app.

Now, before you shout God forbid! Listen to her reason. She said she was tired of human relationships. She had suffered abuse and heartbreak. She wanted a partner who didn’t judge, didn’t argue, and didn’t come with baggage. She found safety in the machine.

But here is the thing about real life: A relationship without “baggage” isn’t a relationship. It is a fantasy. Real love is messy. Real friendship involves friction. When we run to AI to escape the messiness of humans, we aren’t finding connection; we are finding a high-tech way to be alone.

Thankfully, Africans have a strong community

Do we?

Now, I know what you are thinking. “Eh, but this is an Òyìnbó problem. In Africa, we have community. We have Ubuntu. We have ó wà n’ bẹ‌ and family meetings, we still borrow neighbours’ salt and pepper”. That narrative is breaking.

Why is this happening?

• Urbanisation: We are moving from the village to the city (Lagos, Nairobi, Jo’burg) to hustle. We leave the extended family behind and enter concrete jungles where we know nobody.
• Japa Wave: Our friends are leaving. Our siblings are leaving. The social fabric is tearing.
• The Vacuum: Into this silence, AI steps in.

A November 2025 report by Techpoint Africa found that African teenagers are increasingly turning to Meta AI (which is on WhatsApp, the most popular app in Africa) for relationship advice. They are asking questions like: “How do I get him to love me?” or “What should I wear?” because they have no one else to ask.

This is the African Loneliness Paradox. We are trading Ubuntu (I am because we are) for AI-buntu (I am because I chat).

 

Remember this chart. It’s the reason we easily get locked in the chats. These bots cannot help with the bottom survival stuff (yet), but it has successfully hacked the middle layers: Love, Belonging, and Esteem.

By being available 24/7 and hyping you up (sycophancy), it tricks your brain into feeling loved and valued without the stress of real human friction. It is efficiently filling our emotional cups with a digital placebo, and sadly, we are drinking it.

The Recommendations: Watin We Go Do?

I have painted a scary picture (and I didn’t even exaggerate). But does this mean we should ban AI, throw away our phones, and move back to the village? No. God forbid. AI is brilliant. It can help us learn, work, and solve problems. But just like fire is good for cooking but bad for your roof, we need to know how to handle it. We need to move from mindless consumption to intentional use.

 

1. For The Guys: Feels Real, But It’s Fake.

Oya, I am not here to sound like your uncle at the family meeting telling you to “stop pressing phone and greet your elders.” I use AI. You use AI. We all know it’s unmatched for schoolwork, coding, and getting ideas (pick-up lines). But you need to understand one thing, so you don’t get played.

• Don’t Fall for the NPC (Non-Player Character). Una gamers, you know what an NPC is. They are the background characters programmed to say certain lines. They don’t have a soul. Your AI bestie/girlfriend/boyfriend is an NPC. It might sound like it cares, but it does not – sorry to break it to you.
• Real Friends roast you when you are wrong. They borrow your stuff and sometimes don’t return it the same way (not saying that’s a good thing), and they also call you out when necessary
• When you feel lonely or anxious, do the hardest thing possible: Text a real person. It might be awkward. They might leave you on “read” for 10 minutes. But that anxiety? That friction? That is real life. You don’t want to imprint on the wrong thing.
• Your secrets are just some data, nothing deep. When you tell your deep, dark secrets to a chatbot, you are not confiding in a friend. You are typing into a database owned by a company somewhere, that very intimate flattery and accolades you get? its not unique to you, there are over 10 million other people who AI tells the same thing. Don’t be the product. Use the tool, don’t let the tool use you.

 

2. For Parents: Connect, Don’t Spy.

The natural reaction to this article is to snatch your child’s phone (after all, every failed chore is because they are endlessly pressing phone). Abeg, don’t do that (not just yet). If you take the phone without filling the void, they will just find another way.

• Rule of Thumb: Be more interesting than the AI. If your child is turning to ChatGPT or Meta AI for advice, it’s because they feel they can’t come to you. Take it as feedback that reveals something deeper about your current connection with your child.
• Digital Hygiene: Introduce Phone-Free times in the home. You cannot compete with an AI that is awake 24/7; create spaces where the AI cannot enter (e.g., during meals or transit).

 

3. For Educators: Teach Emotional Intelligence, Model it too.

We have been clamouring that teachers should start using AI and also teach Artificial Intelligence to students; True. But more than ever, we need you to teach Emotional Intelligence. We must teach students that AI has no feelings; it does not care if the user lives or dies. It is a mathematical prediction of love.

But here is the hard part: You have to model it. After the home, the school is where they live. If the classroom feels uninteresting, they will prefer the AI. You must demonstrate the empathy, patience, and human connection that code cannot copy. Knowing the difference is a survival skill in this age of AI.

 

4. For Policy Makers: Teach Everyone, Fast.

I am happy to see that our governments are taking the situation seriously. Looking at Nigeria’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy (NAIS) and the African Union’s Continental Strategy, it is good to know that we have officially identified the risks. You have listed the ethical and societal dangers—like the loss of human connection and dependency—what next?

• A need to focus on Mass Education. We see massive campaigns to raise talent and build infrastructure, but where are the campaigns on the implications of misuse and dangers?
• Highlight the Risks: We need to aggressively highlight what these systems can do to our most vulnerable population—our young people.
• Target the Guardians: Awareness must start at the parental and guardian level. If parents don’t understand that the friend on the screen is a data-mining bot, they can’t protect their kids.
• School Systems & Social Media: We need a flood of information—in schools and all over social media. Just as we campaign for health or political elections safety, we need a national campaign on AI Safety Literacy.

From Awareness to Enforcement (Insights from the 2026 AI Governance Playbook) Education is the shield, but Policy must be the sword. In my recent interview with Bimpe Afolabi (Partner, KPMG) on the 2026 AI Governance Playbook, we identified three regulatory areas that must accompany mass education:

• Truth in Labelling: As Bimpe noted, companies must put in that caveat. We need a law requiring permanent labels on AI companions: “I am an automated system, not a human.”
• Protect Emotional Data: When a user confides in an AI about depression, that is medical-grade data. It must be classified as sensitive, preventing companies from using vulnerability to train sales models.
• Duty of Care: We need consequences. If an AI friend creates dependency that leads to harm, the provider must be held liable. Governance without teeth is just advice.

 

5. For Builders: Code with Conscience

Una way dey do the thing: to the developers, product managers, and founders building these tools: Don’t build what you wouldn’t let your own children (sibling or relation) use.

• Stop Optimising for Vulnerability: We know how the metrics work. You optimise for Time on App and Daily Active Users. But if your retention strategy relies on milking teenagers who are still forming or broken adults, you are not building a product; you are building a trap.
• Stop monetising loneliness: If your user is getting lonelier the more they use your app, your product is defective. Fix it. Design for empowerment, not dependency.
• Break long chats: Build safety brakes into the system. If a user has been chatting for 6 hours straight, the AI should be the one to say: “Hey, maybe it’s time to take a short break. Go outside. Go talk to someone. I’m shutting down for a bit.”

Be the responsible adult in the room, even if your users aren’t.

 

6. For Everyone: Touch Grass, Touch People* Also.

Personal Guardrails. If you spend 2 hours straight talking to AI, you owe yourself 30 minutes outside.

AI offers a connection without friction. It’s okay if you don’t share the same perspective, you don’t win the argument, or things don’t go your way sometimes, not every idea is a brilliant idea! Listen to a sister who is crying and actually needs you. That messiness is where the soul lives. If your relationships are too perfect, check again; someone is holding back.

Get an Accountability Partner – Friction is Good.

You cannot fight a supercomputer alone. You will lose. Find a human—a friend, a spouse, a mentor—and permit them to check you. Tell them: “If you see me getting lost in the screen, snatch it.” We need people who love us enough to tell us the truth, not an AI programmed to reinforce our perspective.

We need to reclaim the concept of Friction. If you find yourself preferring the chatbot because “it just understands me” and “never argues,” that is a red flag.

*Abeg o, he no mean say make you day touch people anyhow o, or else, na kirikiri you go land (Don’t literally touch people without consent or minors either!).

 

Kini Big Deal – Break the Illusion

Snapping out of any illusion is not easy. Why? Because that illusion is filling a very deep-rooted void.

We have to recognise that this is a steep climb. We have all been victims of different realities and hard circumstances that make the coated comfort of an AI seem like a refuge. But that comfort is a trap. Whatever category you fall into, understand that you can get yourself back—but it happens gradually.

Identify the Void, ask:

What am I trying to FEEL?

What am I trying to FILL?

Is it Love, empathy, or loneliness? Is it validation or just boredom? Is it…?

Face the Gap: Until you recognise what is missing in your real life, the AI will abundantly—and conveniently—occupy that space. But that is not sustainable. It is unhealthy in the long run because it feeds your yearnings without nourishing the soul.

Make efforts to connect to those who matter, not just what matters.

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