University of Michigan School of Information professor Ron Eglash earned an anti-racism grant from the U-M Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR). 

Eglash and Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design professor Audrey Bennett’s new project explores how “AI might reverse its potentially debilitating impact on Black artisans” by protecting artisans from the risks of AI while using its tools to help develop new economic opportunities and international cultural explorations. 

“We are starting with the simple, fundamental principle of generative justice,” Eglash says. “Value should be returned to those who create it. If we start there, we can explore how to build a worker-owned economy, establish community-owned AI platforms and liberate the generative potential at the intersections of race, culture and technology.” 

Through Ubuntu-AI, Eglash is working to prevent AI companies from grabbing artisanal labor and design and using it as training data. Rather than the platform being controlled by an external entity, Ubuntu-AI puts the African artisans in control of the platform, letting them choose how to license images and exploring how they want to see AI play a role in their process. 

“Most AI companies just grab whatever they can find online and treat it as training data,” Eglash says. “That puts artists and designers everywhere, especially in developing economies, in a precarious position. If you demand they do not use your images or data, then search engines (which are increasingly based on AI) will claim you do not exist. If you capitulate and give away your data, AI can now replicate your images and styles, without your involvement. We call that the ‘AI double bind.’”

The way around this, Eglash argues, is creating  platforms like Ubuntu-AI that are owned and controlled by those doing the creative work, and are protected from the AI double bind through both licensing and technology-based access control. 

On the Detroit side of the project,  the team is installing laser cutters, 3D printers and other digital tools in local artisan’s studios. 

“One role for AI might be ‘translating’ the original design to fabrication-ready products,” Eglash says. “But there is also the cultural space this platform creates for new kinds of conversations and collaborations that draw from both sides of the Black Atlantic experience.”

Eglash’s project is in collaboration with Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design professor Audrey Bennett, UMSI PhD student Micheal Nayebare, UMSI alum Kwame Robinson and Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design software developer Andrew Hunn. 

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Read “OVPR anti-racism grants awarded to eight research teams” on The Record. 

Learn more about UMSI professor Ron Eglash by visiting his faculty profile. 

— Noor Hindi, UMSI public relations specialist