Wonder and Kent discuss the innovative participatory experience, Being (the Digital Griot), which features an AI run on datasets from Black communities, theorists, poets, and activists. Being leads community discussions designed to both challenge and unify. Emerging themes include prioritizing lineage and attribution in large language models, decolonization, affirmations, challenging group discussions, and the importance of situating healing inside both intellectual and embodied models. Astrologically this brought to the surface the planets Mercury and Venus, as well as the 9th House.
Distribution: More info
Director: Rashaad Newsome
Music: Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe
Run Time: 94 minutes
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.459] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. Wonder Bright: And I'm Wonder Bright. Kent Bye: And welcome to the Story All the Way Down podcast, where we're breaking down the archetypal dynamics of stories that were featured at Sundance 2024. Specifically, a lot of the documentaries and some of the emerging technology pieces like today's episode, which we're focusing on a piece called Being (the Digital Griot), which is a part of the Sundance New Frontier selection. I've been covering the Sundance New Frontier since 2016. That's typically where you see a lot of the emerging technologies, whether it be virtual or augmented reality. In this case, it's artificial intelligence, where it was a performance that we were able to see half of it. We weren't able to see the full experience of Being (the Digital Griot), but we did get a chance to see a couple of videos, and I had a chance to do an interview with the director, Rashaad Newsome, on my other podcast of The Voices of VR. So, as of this point, Being (Digital Griot) doesn't have broader distribution, and so if you didn't have a chance to see it, there will be a documentary that he's creating that will have more information about the process of creating this piece, but hopefully this will be at least some sense of a portion of this experience that was shown at Sundance.
[00:01:20.788] Wonder Bright: Also, I would like to mention that beingthedigitalgriot.com is a website which is pretty comprehensive and has lots of really wonderful videos of being in action.
[00:01:32.395] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, this is the first of four episodes in our last section that we're covering here that's going to be talking about the promises and perils of AI in emerging technologies. So Wonder, I’m wondering if you'd be willing to read the synopsis for Being (the Digital Griot).
[00:01:47.069] Wonder Bright: I would be delighted. In this innovative participatory experience, Being, an artificial intelligence digital griot asks the audience to engage in unifying and challenging discussions. It features a soundscape and movement informed by a data set from Black communities, theorists, poets, and activists, including bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Dazié Grego-Sykes, and Cornel West. Being (the Digital Griot) is a machine learning model run by a counter-hegemonic algorithm that multidisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome has been developing since 2019. Being (the digital griot), takes the humanoid form of a 30-foot-tall, femme-vogue, afro-futurist cyborg who writes and reads poetry and leads critical pedagogy workshops that teach people to decolonize their minds. Colonial values of extraction and exploitation live ubiquitously inside the hearts and minds of colonial subjects and are the roots of our unconscious compulsion to dehumanize and extract value from each other and from our planet. Being offers generous ways of forging relationships with others and with ourselves. Newsome reminds us that AI is powered by the richness of our collective human archive and is a reflection of the values of the designer. And that synopsis comes to us from Sundance programmer, Shari Frilot.
[00:03:14.505] Kent Bye: Yeah, so we had a chance to see the first two sections of this piece. There's four total sections. So the first section of Being (the Digital Griot) is like a half hour of this AI entity named Being that is trained on this poet named Dazié Grego-Sykes. And so there's a lot of poetry and affirmations and visuals of fractals that you see in the first section. And that sort of gets the audience into this receptive mode of having these affirmations, but also having these different associative links that are being read by this AI to open up the mind into other possibilities. The second section is this workshop on decolonization, where it just sets a broader context for both the process of how Being (the Digital Griot) came about through this process of training different AIs, but also to set this broader context for looking at this global context of colonization and how to think about the influence of what bell hooks talks about: these large influences of both capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, and that the audience is then invited into the third section, which is to have a discussion with your neighbor around how each of these systems of power and oppression are influencing each of our lives. And then the section that we didn't have a chance to see at all was the audience coming back and reporting their experiences and their insights to Being, in this conversational AI approach where you're able to speak to the AI that is then trained on all of these decolonized thinkers from Cornel West, Paula Ferrer, bell hooks, and other authors of decolonization, as well as some of the writings of Rashaad Newsome. So we didn't have a chance to see that section where it's a little bit more of the interactive part where you're able to have this dialogue with Being (the Digital Griot). But yeah, we did get a chance to see at least a little bit of a glimpse, and I had a chance to have an interview and conversation with Rashaad Newsome just to talk a little bit more about the process of creating this project. Typically, the New Frontier has been around since 2007, they would have anywhere from 15 or 20 or 30 different projects at Sundance. Last year, they took a year off of not having any emerging technology projects. And this year, there was only two projects, Being (the Digital Griot) and then Eno, which was all about Brian Eno and more of a generative process, by which each time you would watch it, it would be, like, a different cut. So it's using generative AI in the background to actually have different mixes of the film each time you would watch it. So we got a little bit of a glimmer of this piece without getting the full experience, but yeah, I thought I'd just set a little bit of the context and love to open it up to some of your thoughts and reactions to the piece.
[00:05:57.724] Wonder Bright: Well, I didn't have any context for it when we started watching it. And it was actually the very first piece from Sundance that we watched because we needed to watch it so that you could interview Rashaad Newsome. So I came to it with no preconceptions or ideas whatsoever. And so my first impressions of it were a little confusing because I didn't know who had made this creature, or what its lineage was. And it was obvious that it was trans from the voice. And I definitely had this impression, like, oh, I'm watching a digital drag queen. And I think I was only acquainted with the word griot because Being introduces themselves, and names that as a function of what they are. So it was confounding to try and place myself in relation to it. And I suspect that one of the reasons it was especially confounding is because it doesn't meet any kind of expectation that I could have about what I think AI might be, or is, which honestly, I have pretty scathing opinions about AI as a general rule. And so that was really refreshing. But it did mean that it took me longer to kind of warm up and really start to listen to what Being was saying, which was a process that was enormously helped by the music and the movement. So there was this very - seductive is not quite the right word because there's a kind of implication of manipulation in that. But, you know, if you find, like, the idea of a warm shower on a cold day seductive, then maybe you'll understand what I mean. Because Being is very warm, and they really welcome the audience in to engage from the perspective of our own healing, and to be with them in a way that would facilitate that. So it's funny because I was looking up things about Being later and sad that we had missed the Q&A for that one, because of course we had a screener for it because you were interviewing the creator.
[00:08:43.011] Kent Bye: This one actually was not available to be seen at all. So none of the Q&As would have been available because it wasn't available online at all.
[00:08:50.640] Wonder Bright: Okay, perfect. So I don't remember why I was looking it up, but I did see that there had been an altercation after the performance at Sundance, where someone in the audience had this very strong reaction to AI as a general rule. And I won't even go into the details because I read it over a week ago, I don't remember, and I wasn't there to begin with. The only reason I'm bringing it up is because because I don't know what they saw to have that strong reaction to. My whole experience was one of, I mean, I guess I have this sort of inherent assumption that AI is a bit of an inevitability at this point. And this was, like, one of the first things I've ever experienced as far as AI that made me feel hopeful at all. Because there was an experience that I really welcome, which is an explicit act of decolonization. And because I think a lot of my personal fears about AI have to do with this sort of, like, death march of capitalism, and the squeezing out of creativity and individual voices, and that is so consistent with colonialism and settler mindsets that I personally would like to extricate myself from, let alone the world. So to engage with a creation that was explicitly seeking to do those things itself, was really inspiring and left me feeling very, very hopeful. And the farther along we went into the piece and the more the movements corresponded with this kind of fractal, visual, moving landscapes where I felt like I was in a living kaleidoscope somehow, and the music also just is extraordinary. I think the person who did the music is actually the same person that did the soundtrack for Power, which we talked about in our first section earlier in this series. And I apologize, I didn't look up his name before we sat down. I'll leave it in the notes, but the music is really wonderful. It's hypnotic, it's rhythmic, and it's trance-like. And that suits Beings' words as they guide us through variations on meditations and then also on just observations about what this world is that we're living in and what it could be.
[00:11:41.198] Kent Bye: Yeah, a quick note about the music is that Rashaad Newsome told me that they actually did a survey asking Black people, what is the most soothing or healing qualities of music, and then they took those survey results and started to orchestrate the music that was trying to fulfill those qualities that were from that survey. And so I feel like this section that we're talking about, the Promises and Perils of AI and Emerging Technologies, and in a lot of ways, this project is aiming more towards the exalted potentials of what these technologies could do. And at the same time, there are certainly a flip side of all the things that are the perils of these technologies. AI just generally has been a very polarizing topic. When I talked to Rashaad Newsome, he fully recognized that this is a topic that is bringing in a lot of concerns just because the legacy of how technology companies have, let's say, not been in right relationship to how these models are being trained, how they may be displacing workers, the threats of how AI and the writing of scripts could be displacing jobs in Hollywood. So this is a topic with both the Screen Actors Guild as well as with the screenwriters that AI technologies are in direct competition to potentially displace jobs in the creative industry. So there's going to be a lot of people who have a lot of high emotions around this as a topic. I believe that some of the context of what had happened at Sundance, I only saw some articles, but someone had got up during the Q&A and started cursing out the AI, and then they were asked to leave, and then there was a number of people that left in solidarity. I feel like it's a polarizing topic to be discussing.
[00:13:21.158] Wonder Bright: And perhaps especially at Sundance where you will have filmmakers and people associated with the industry that are deeply concerned about this issue and the displacement of jobs within that industry because of AI.
[00:13:33.841] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, there's going to be very specific context of what had happened at Sundance, but usually there is a certain amount of decorum of interaction that I think is expected within the context of Sundance, which is that there's a certain amount of respect to the artists and the creators, and there may be deep feelings and passions around some of these larger ideas of technology, but I feel like if I were to make a guess, since we weren't there, I feel like there's some boundaries that were transgressed that were entering into more of a level of disrespect for the artists and creator.
[00:14:06.059] Wonder Bright: Well, this is the thing, and also, I'm amazed that they got through the whole piece, and then that's still where they landed. So, it tugged at me that that had occurred, because I personally have a bias against AI, and yet this was a piece that I... felt was really pushing the boundaries of what I would want AI to be. You know, this is like exactly the thing, like this piece actually is bringing into AI the very thing that has concerned me is missing, which is an ability to look at humanity and how we got here, but with compassion rather than trying to evade or escape. It's actually, no, let's look more deeply.
[00:14:54.013] Kent Bye: Yeah, and the sections that we watched were much more curated. When I was talking to Rashaad Newsome, there was a way in which that he's able to prompt the model to be able to curate a whole experience. That's the first half hour that we watched, which is this affirmation based poetry that is mimicking Dazié Grego-Sykes in terms of the style. The other more interactive sections, he's presumably creating some sort of large language model that you're able to ask questions and interact with and training it on data sets from bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Cornell West. I don't know if there was some question that was asked and then the answer came back was triggering in some ways. It's hard for me to know.
[00:15:32.834] Wonder Bright: Yeah, we weren't there. Like I said, I only brought it up, not to continue belaboring the point, but just to point out that there is a pushback against AI, especially in the arts community, and to contrast my experience of what I saw with what I had heard had happened there. That's the only reason I brought it up. I mean, we can't know what happened. There's no point us litigating it. We weren't even there. The thing that it brings up is that this is a contentious, debatable process that we're engaged in as a species. And it's a necessary one because I really do think at this point, the writing's on the wall and AI is inevitable. Like, it's here now. So given that, what strategies do we have to work with it in ways that will add meaning or that could potentially, you know, prevent the AI overlords from becoming overlords, right? And this strategy that Rashaad Newsome is employing to really seek to get to the roots of how humanity has created this death march of capitalism, by decolonizing our minds is like, that's where we need to start. Surely, surely. So it was extremely refreshing to see AI programmed with that intention explicitly in mind.
[00:17:03.314] Kent Bye: Yeah. And the other aspect of this piece and what they're doing and what Rashaad decided to do, is it's this question of identity. How do you give a Black identity to something that is essentially a digital being? And Rashaad decided to turn to the ballroom community and to actually do some motion capture of folks who are doing this kind of femme vogue dance that has a lot of Black, queer, Latinx community members that he was able to work in collaboration with them to create this whole voguing style of Being within the context of the first section of the poetry. And what it reminds me of is this piece that was at Tribeca Immersive back in 2022. It was called The Black Movement Library by LaJuné McMillian. And what McMillian was doing was trying to preserve the movement of Black bodies in the context of motion capture, because most motion capture data doesn't have much diversity or Black representation. But at the same time, there's this paradox, which is that once you start to archive it, then what happens to that information? What is the integrity for who gets access to that archive? What can they do with it? And so there's this whole issue of appropriation of this type of movement and this type of data. And I feel like being in conversation with Rashaad Newsome, I was able to ask him, okay, well, with AI, it's got this colonizing impulse to try to seize data and then take ownership and
[00:18:29.628] Wonder Bright: modify it.
[00:18:30.649] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I think it's within that larger context of capitalism that there's a lot of pernicious aspects for how AI has already been used and will continue to be used. With open AI as an example, just kind of training all these data sets on, like, New York Times articles without a licensing agreement. And there's a current lawsuit where the New York Times is suing OpenAI for plagiarism because if you prompt ChatGBT with the beginnings of a New York Times article, it'll just basically plagiarize the gist of an entire article from the New York Times. So there's this question of, as these AIs start to have all these amazing capabilities, then what is the data set that's being used to train it and what kind of right relationship is being made with the source of the labor that is creating that data? And so in talking to Rashaad, he said that one of the things he's trying to do with Being (the Digital Griot) is actually cite the sources and to also try to amplify these messages of decolonization rather than to kind of seize the data and just purely profit on it. So it's within this artistic context, but also trying to amplify those sources rather than to take the data without citing where it came from. So I think that's some key differentiating factors that may or may not been clear to people within the audience as they're watching it.
[00:19:45.327] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I certainly wasn't flagging that as a potential problem. However, as you say it, I'm very aware that Being did mention several times that they were drawing their texts from bell hooks. I remember especially because I love her, and who their ancestors were, because that's kind of how Being was approaching it. This is where I come from. And that too was very refreshing, you know, Being mentioned several times that their father is Rashaad Newsom, and they would talk about Rashaad as “my father”. So to be explicit just from that point of view, that attribution, this is the human that has made me, is also refreshing, because generally when I think about AI, I think about this ubiquitous thing that was grown in a lab by a bunch of white men, you know, and that's typically kind of how it's presented, as if it's just this very matter of fact, next generation of industry and technology, and what the human mind can do. Human mind, as if the human mind was, like, some version of every man rather than, no, this is specific to the kinds of people that are allowed access to the kinds of universities that can then go forth and actually create and work in robotics and technology. So, to hear an AI describe lineage in that fashion was really, really interesting. Like, we have that in sci-fi, like, Astro Boy, you know, there's like a lot of sci-fi fantasy fiction around like the father of an AI situation, but it's not the common way we think of it at this point. AI is just some sort of general ChatGPT algorithm that's going to, like, help me proofread my paper, or help me write my blog post. And it’s, like, it's just a very different quality of, well, being. It's a very different quality of being than what Being presented.
[00:21:52.731] Kent Bye: Yeah, when I start to think about some of the primary signatures of an experience like this, given the caveat that we didn't get to see the full experience of the full interactive part, but... well, yeah, and then seeing the full experience would be experiencing the full experience rather than just seeing.
[00:22:08.400] Wonder Bright: So in many ways, the only moment that we got to experience was when, at the end of the sort of workshop, we turned to one another and asked each other the questions that Being had asked us to ask.
[00:22:22.188] Kent Bye: Right. And we had no opportunity to report back or to hear the larger discussion, which I think would really be the heart of the interactive portion of the AI. That is really the thing that's probably one of the most interesting things, which is, what kind of group conversations can you start to facilitate with AI as the mediator, which I first saw back at DocLab in 2019 with Frankenstein AI, where they started to have round table discussions and people were listening in and having the AI provide different questions for people to have group conversations. And so you start to see this infusion of AI technologies for social dynamics with some of these different experiences. So I can only sort of leverage what I've experienced in the past and project out some of that for what it might've felt like. But The topics of what we're talking about here, I think there's a lot of 1st House things with identity. What's it mean to have artificial intelligence, Being, that is, representing some sort of identity from a certain person, place, and context, in this case a Black American, immigrant, queer, experience that has a large awareness informed by all the relational dynamics of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism, these large systems of power control. So there's a lot of large topics that I guess are sometimes difficult to pin down to a single astrological signature. Maybe Saturn-Pluto would be an appropriate one of talking about the structures of power and influence in our society. But there is a lot of, I'd say, 9th House emphasis, which is Rashaad, in both the description of this piece as well as, I think from being themselves, they're talking about this archive of knowledge. So I think of 9th House as this philosophy, higher learning, but also libraries and repositories of knowledge. And so how can you start to curate specific archives of knowledge that you can interact with, and maybe provide a specific experience that is going to drive people towards either new insights, new ways of relating to each other, or relating to the world around you? And so I feel like this AI is this intervention to be able to facilitate this vast library of knowledge that is interacted with through this mercurial process of interacting, participating, speaking, interrogating these thoughts and ideas. And so there's a strong mercurial presence throughout the course of this piece. You know, you're listening to a lot of the poetry from Being, but also engaging in a dialectical process by interacting with people in the audience about these questions, but also engaging in a broader dialogue with Being themselves.
[00:25:02.419] Wonder Bright: Yes, I was really picking up more on planetary signatures, and I'll definitely co-sign the mercurial one. I think it's in the name Griot, like a storyteller, someone who is going to tell the stories of the people, and share them from one to another, and to also share the meanings of those stories. However, the thing that is actually quite intriguing to me about Being as an AI, is that I would associate normally Mercury with AI. I would be less likely to associate Venus with AI, even though we now have, like, AI that's out there making all of the images in the form of X, Y, or Z, it feels exceptionally derivative. And the reason the Venusian portion of the program with Being didn't feel that way to me is because it was introduced as a part of the mercurial expression of Being. So as Being is speaking to us, they are moving. And then later Being is still speaking to us, but they're speaking over these digital overlays of abstractions that, you know, there's so many I'm not going to be able to a lot of fractal geometry. Yeah, that's moving. It's like a moving kaleidoscope as Being is speaking to us about different ideas and also giving us different meditations. And because it's also, the music is woven in so tightly to the experience on every single level, there isn't a space where it feels derivative in an extractive way. It feels as if it's coming from something directly, as in a lineage. And the impact that that has is, like, astrologically, if you're looking for harm or disease in someone's chart, and you see Mercury is afflicted in some way, you can see that that person is going to be plagued by difficult thoughts. And that kind of speaks to the human experience where healing doesn't just happen on a mercurial level. It's not enough to be aware. It's not enough to think about something. We actually have to feel our way into experience. We have to cathart and release. And that takes place in more of an emotional Venusian lunar realm rather than in a mercurial realm. It's one thing to be aware of something, it's another thing to cathart, to feel, to release something. And Being actually offers their mercurial nature in service of that catharsis, in service of that Venusian expression of healing through love. I had this experience of Being being very loving in their questions. So they're mercurial. They are asking us questions. They're asking us to deconstruct things. And they're doing it from this very loving space where they have reassured us that we are right where we're supposed to be, and we are as we need to be, and we have everything that we need for the journey ahead of us in this experience. And so to me it's a really wonderful collusion of both the mercurial and the venusian signatures in a way that is uniquely qualified to offer inspiration and healing.
[00:28:47.386] Kent Bye: Yeah. It's a lot of really good points because, you know, we tend to think about AI as a mercurial thing, intelligence and all these things, artificial intelligence. And yet I feel like this piece manages to have a lot of embodied expression, and more of the, the venusian aspects of that body, but also the feeling and the lunar aspects as well. We didn't get a chance to see the more social catharsis that could have been a potential for this, for people to get up and share some of the direct experiences of what their own experiences of experiencing these power structures are and the harms and traumas that they've experienced. But it feels like Being is kind of, like, this healing balm that's trying to create this context for people to be safe, to explore some of these concepts. So when you think about, in the remedial context, who would you prescribe Being (the Digital Griot) to?
[00:29:39.229] Wonder Bright: Actually, I think I would prescribe it for anyone who's interested in healing modalities using both learning and conscious awareness, Mercury, and also really thinking about what it might take to heal their emotional state and to be treating themselves with love and care using Venus. And this might be a good point to actually mention that on Being (the Digital Griot) website, they do mention that Rashaad Newsome, I don't know if he spoke to you about it in your interview with him, but he's creating an app for black and brown people to work with Being as an AI therapeutic tool to help them deal with their own traumas related to being Black in Western culture. And there's a number of different offerings that this app is looking at doing, so it's not available yet. But if you are interested in that, I would suggest going to the website and signing up.
[00:30:44.841] Kent Bye: And I did have a chance to do an interview with Rashaad Newsome in episode 1,345 of the Voices of VR podcast, where we dive deep into his own process of creating this piece, which I think adds a lot of context for folks who were not able to watch it. You can also hear directly from Rashaad, because When I think about this piece, I really want to just bear witness to what Rashaad is doing with this, because I think it's really quite provocative to use these AI tools in an artistic context to push the bounds for how these technologies could be used in more of these pro-social contexts, but also these new social rituals of bringing people together and having conversations in a way that starts to transform what it means to go to a theater experience, where normally when we're watching theater, we're really receptive and passive and watching film that's been authored by the directors and storytellers and the filmmakers that is going to be essentially the same every time, but going into a theater context and then being able to have these more dynamic, interactive social experiences, but also to have a one-on-one conversation with Being and to try to bring more awareness to this archive of knowledge, very specifically curated to transmit these certain ideas. So I think that's a very provocative idea. I think we're going to see a lot more of that as we move forward, of what's it mean to have these interactive experiential stories that allow us to immerse ourselves into a story world or to immerse ourselves into a certain idea or perspective that may be new or different or novel, or even if it's not new or different or novel, can it help give us access to these concepts in a new way? And I feel like that's a lot of what Being (the Digital Griot) is doing in this piece.
[00:32:33.775] Wonder Bright: I'm just going to mention that theater is much older than cinema, and that the original meaning of theater in Greek comes from the word catharsis. So it's entirely consistent with theatrical production to have this experience of engagement, and crowds expression, that is cohesive and brings people together, and I think it's consistent also with the queer folx that we see working with Newsome in order to create this piece, because that’s, after all, where voguing comes from, is from queer people coming together to support and encourage one another in these dances, and to create themselves with one another in these ways. And so it's really a wonderful thing to see that, being brought forward in the way that Newsome is doing it. Yeah. And I'm very happy to be able to bear witness to it in the way that I was, even without it being a live piece. It was still extremely moving and left me surprised at how hopeful I felt from receiving it.
[00:33:52.721] Kent Bye: Well, this is kicking off the first of four in our series of looking at the promise and perils of AI and emerging technologies and our discussion around Being (the Digital Griot) in this episode. And we'll be diving into many of the other dimensions of these AI and emerging technologies in the next episodes here coming up. So yeah, that's all that we have for today. And I just want to thank you for listening to the Story All the Way Down podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do, spread the word, and tell your friends, and consider signing up on the newsletter at storyallthewaydown.com. Thanks for listening. Wonder Bright: Thank you.
