Two new coins for South Africa which were designed with the help of AI

The South African Reserve Bank has launched two coins honouring Charlotte Maxeke’s graduation and the 1956 Women’s March.

These are commemorative circulation coins, which are regular money with special designs that honour important historical events, famous people, or major anniversaries.

In this case, the two coins, which will be used in everyday cash transactions, honour milestones in the advancement of women in South Africa.

The first R2 coin commemorates 125 years since Charlotte Maxeke became the first black South African woman to graduate with a university degree.

The second coin commemorates 70 years since the 1956 Women’s March, when 20,000 women marched to the Union Buildings to protest apartheid pass laws.

The coin is part of the Milestones of Freedom programme, launched by President Cyril Ramaphosa in June 2026.

The South African Reserve Bank Governor, Lesetja Kganyago, said that these R2 coins are the first commemorative circulation coins in South Africa to feature women.

He added that the coins serve to correct a historical imbalance in national memory where women’s contributions have often been overlooked.

Kganyago added that the launch forms part of a broader freedom program by the South African Reserve Bank.

In June 2026, the central bank released a R2 coin commemorating the 1976 Soweto youth uprising.

The Reserve Bank also plans to issue another coin later this year to mark 30 years since the adoption of the South African Constitution.

“Let me remind members of the public that these coins remain ordinary tender and their face value, however beautiful they may be,” Kganyago said.

“They belong in circulation to be passed from one person to another to pass the story of those great women. Keep the coins circulating.”

The coins were designed with the help of AI

MyBroadband reported that AI tools played a role in the design’s creation, alongside the work of SA Mint Senior Artist Lilian Guerra.

“The composition, layout, and typography of the R2 commemorative circulation coin were designed by Guerra,” the South African Reserve Bank said.

Guerra has been an artist at the country’s producer of physical currency since 1999. She has worked on and helped design numerous special coins throughout the years.

“Every coin I have designed has created a window into South Africa’s extraordinary history,” she said.

“I am intrigued by the development of digital software and the extraordinary things one can create in a digital medium.”

However, she explained that she still loved hand-drawn illustrations and bas-relief models created in clay and plaster.

The Reserve Bank added that the new coin designs combined photographic references with AI-assisted elements.

It said that Microsoft Copilot was used to adapt the visual style of Guerra’s photographs and drawings to align with the “broader artistic treatment of the coin.”

“It was also used to generate the foreground figures depicting the marchers,” it said. This particular instance is the clearest use of AI on the coin’s design.

Microsoft Copilot’s primary image generation tool, which turns text prompts into images, is called Designer and was formerly known as Bing Image Creator.

It primarily uses OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 image-generation engine, which translates detailed natural-language prompts into visual styles and compositions.

New coins