Does Stage Africa Use AI?
Stage Africa is published by Burtronix CC (registration number 1996/045193/23), trading as Stage Africa ("Stage Africa", "we", "us").
We use AI throughout the work of making Stage Africa, and we encourage you to use it in your own work. AI is changing the work of the people this site is for, and we think the way through that is to use it well.
When what AI does here changes, we change this statement.
What Does AI Do in What I Read Here?
We use AI to research, draft and check our articles and our short notices of events. A person decides what we write about and directs the work on every piece.
AI does more of the work in our directory. AI agents gather public sources, decide from them which people, organisations and places the directory lists, write each entry we compile, and place it on the map. A person chooses where the agents look and can overrule what they decide.
Our graphic design is made with AI as well. Our logo began as ideas a person developed with AI, and a person drew the vector version the site uses from them. Its treatments, and the artwork we derive from it, are made the same way: a person decides what is wanted and directs the AI that makes it.
Who Answers for What Stage Africa Publishes?
Riaan Burger, who edits Stage Africa, answers for everything we publish, whether or not AI helped to make it. That covers our articles, our notices of events, the directory entries we compile, and the pictures we publish with them. What a member publishes on their own entry or in our forum is theirs to answer for.
If you think something we published is wrong, write to corrections@stage.africa. Corrections and Complaints says what happens next.
How Can I Tell Whether AI Was Used on a Piece?
Every article and every short notice of an event tells you. A long-form guide ends with a disclosure that says it was produced with extensive use of AI, names the assistant used for it, and says that a person directs the work and answers for what it says. Any other article or short notice carries a link near its title, "How we use AI", which brings you to this statement.
Every directory entry we compile, and every event listing, carries the same link.
A picture we make with AI says so in its credit, in the place where a photograph's credit names who took it and its licence. The credit reads "Generated with" and names the tool.
Can Someone Put an AI-Made Picture or Voice of Me on Stage Africa?
A picture, a voice or a video on Stage Africa that shows you as you were not, such as in clothes you did not wear or in a scene that did not happen, must have your agreement behind it, whether AI made it or not. For a child, the agreement is a parent's or guardian's. That holds for what we publish and for what members publish.
It must not mislead either. A headshot must look like the person as they are now, and a picture in an article that did not come from a camera says so in its credit. Improving a photograph the way a photographer would, in its light or its colour, still shows a person as they were, and needs no agreement beyond the one the photograph already had.
If a picture, a voice or a video of you is on Stage Africa and you did not agree to it, write to privacy@stage.africa, say which it is, and it comes down.
Can I Use AI for What I Put on Stage Africa?
Yes, and we encourage you to. This answer is for members, who hold an account and can publish on Stage Africa. Use AI to write your biography, draft a funding application, run your lines, translate, or market a show. What you publish is yours to stand behind, however you made it.
You must not use AI to show a real person as they were not, in a picture, a voice or a video, unless that person agreed to it, and for anybody under 18 it is their parent or guardian who agrees. Your directory headshot must look like you do today, because a casting director calls you in on it, and you may touch it up, restyle it or change what you are wearing in it with any tool. Both rules are in our community guidelines.
Can AI Companies Read What I Publish Here?
Yes. Anything on a public page of Stage Africa, including a public profile and its pictures, can be read by the programs AI companies use to gather material from the web, just as search engines can read it. We have no agreement with any AI company to sell or license what members publish here.
When a picture or a profile comes off our pages, a copy that a program, or a person, has already made does not come off with it.
Does Stage Africa Ask Them to Stay Out?
No. A site asks those programs to keep out of parts of it in a file called robots.txt, and a program can ignore that file in any case. Ours, for stage.africa and forum.stage.africa, name no AI company's program. They ask every program to keep out of a few pages, such as search results and, on the forum, its feeds, though the forum's lets Google's own program into most of those. Nothing in them keeps any program away from a member's profile or pictures. We last read them on 16 September 2026.
We leave these programs free to read what is public, because we want what members publish here to be found wherever people look for it, AI assistants included.
Version 1.0, effective 21 September 2026.