UMSI grad student Micheal Nayebare, Stamps Professor Audrey Bennett, and Detroit artisan Monique Whitley.
UMSI grad student Micheal Nayebare, Stamps Professor Audrey Bennett, and Detroit artisan Monique Whitley.
When Stamps Professors Ron Eglash and Audrey Bennett were invited by leading artificial intelligence developers to help democratize AI, they didn’t stop with the original prompt.
Building on two decades of developing computer-assisted learning tools based on “heritage algorithms”, and recent efforts to help artists in Africa return some of the value generated by their creations back to their own communities, Eglash and Bennett went to work on their own set of research questions for the OpenAI Foundation, the research giant behind ChatGPT.
“What they asked for was democratic deliberations on AI policy — what kinds of questions it should refuse, for example. We proposed instead that we examine how to democratize the economics of AI. Ideally we would like to see the actual ownership of the AI to go to the grassroots, to the folks who are doing most of the hard work in society. And much to their credit, they agreed to let us spend the research money on that instead.”
As a result, OpenAI awarded Eglash and Bennett a grant in 2023 to develop a platform for exploring how African artists and designers could co-develop AI tools, retain control over how their data and images are used in AI model training, and build an online community around democratic and shared ownership of the platform itself.
Now, with additional funding from a recent Office of the Vice President for Research grant, the researchers and their team, which includes Wayne State Professor Kwame Robinson and U‑M School of Information Ph.D. candidate Micheal Nayebare, are examining how this platform might connect to their work with Detroit artisans.
“The NSF funded our research on how digital fabrication tools might benefit small worker-owned shops in Detroit,” Eglash explained. “With so many of them located in Detroit’s Black communities, it seemed like a unique opportunity to explore how AI and platform-based technologies might create new collaborations between African heritage communities on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.”
