How Nairobi hawkers are cashing in on artificial intelligence

Nairobi hawker Mutui Kitana spends a lot of time in the upmarket Kileleshwa district these days. He is among street vendors dealing in a new crop of art which has come up with the artificial intelligence (AI) boom.

AI art, created through text-to-image AI models like OpenAI’s DALL-E and Google’s Imagen, is printed, framed, and sold on city streets and traffic.

Kitana and his colleagues are increasingly making good money out of the ‘machine-made’ art, as he calls them.

A piece goes for between Ksh.5,000 to Ksh.8,000, up from the Ksh.700 he and his colleagues get them for from a Githurai-based seller, and Kitana says he sells an average of two a day.

“Customers still prefer hand-drawn paintings; some who know the difference have been telling us to stop selling these machine-made paintings,” he tells Citizen Digital. “Others do not tell the difference and love my pieces. They keep coming back for more.”