Real Innovators Don’t Fear Ai: How The Creators Of American Culture Are Now Defining AfroFuturism In The Ai Era

My skin still felt damp from the commute. I’d been salivating over the final details of our film during the entire ride down the 2 train and across the L, especially the soundscape. Usually we met at a popular members-only club in Brooklyn for our in-person edit sessions but today my co-directors and I were meeting at their home. The members-only club upped the pricing and thus far I’ve opted against becoming a member to save the money buying me entrance to the “in” crowd to put towards tangible tools like a new camera lens. Plus, the club I dance at is in Brooklyn and it made sense to meet at their home to maximize our time together before I had to start my shift. 

At our last meeting we decided the soundscape needed to be entirely unique to our project, so I wrote a poem in between stage sets and lap dances and asked a friend with a sultry voice to read each stanza and send me an audio recording. We planned on merging her voice with some classical string instruments and pulsing bass to create a soundtrack that is more like a futuristic fever dream than simply “background music.” 

My heart fluttered listening to our mock-up film score cobbled together with copyrighted music, our friend’s warm voice tones and duty-free music available within Adobe Premiere. It worked, and I mean really worked. Our only problem was translating how we needed our soundscape to feel to a foley artist without losing any emotion in translation. I had about twenty minutes left to brainstorm before I risked getting reprimanded for lateness at work so we spit-balled a summary for a sound artist. I subtly entered our adjectives into ChatGPT as my two co-directors listed criteria, just to see what it generated. Uncomfortably, the thinking-machine pushed out a succinct, easy summary we could pass onto our sound designer with five minutes left to spare before I needed to rush around for the second time that day. But–something felt off about the description. Nick, who has worked with the likes of Zendaya, Law Roach, Cash Cobain, and somehow, me, turned and said “I don’t know sis, it’s just corny? Too cookie-cutter for us.” We opted for our own flawed, but honest description to send to our sound designer. 

I felt a twinge of guilt for asking ChatGPT to think for me in the first place, but I also felt relief. In a three-person production team for a film funded solely by lap dances we needed every strategic advantage possible that closes the gap between us and filmmakers funded by studios, what was wrong with testing out the tech? 

As I got dressed in my all-red lingerie for the night I couldn’t help but feel a sense of indignance, knowing in my gut that other independent creatives are experimenting with Ai as a way to maintain artistic integrity rather than to riff or take from others–so when I had a moment between stage sets I DM’d one of my favorite independent artists for research purposes and, frankly, validation.

Jessic_nt (pronounced Jessicunt for those asking) and I had just recently shared a mutual rant about the ethical qualms involved in Black creatives pioneering new technology over drinks at a Brooklyn watering hole, so I felt eager to hear more. JessicNT, who has opened for Kelela (who is perhaps the afrofuturist artist of our time), has an open-mindedness that might just be a reflection of her gemini placements or might just be the kind of adaptive mindset this moment in history requires. “I’ve seen Ai and NFTs in a digital landscape change Black creatives’ lives for the better – but I can’t stop thinking about how much it cooks the planet.” We wondered together, is there a way to square the balance between historically excluded people finally getting access to capital by being first-movers in AI spaces and the tech itself deteriorating our communities? 

Witness, too, how unquestioningly Elon Musk dumps the waste from his Ai-superplant in Boxtown, Memphis a Black neighborhood. To Elon, training Grok at a rapid pace and offering Boxtown tax revenue is worth the formaldehyde poisoning the air, killing residents softly. Very much in accordance with Elon’s post-empathy universe, the benefit to a few will always outweigh the harm to many (Musk’s team did not respond to my request for comment on the impact of his plant on Boxtown’s Black community). Jessic_nt doesn’t want to add any scaffolding to the post-human world the richest man on earth hopes he can create. 

And yet–the world building Black artists are already doing with Ai is unique, powerful, and understands Ai as a tool in creating worlds that are for us, and by us rather than as an efficiency hack. Jessic_nt distinguishes Black creators creating wakanda-eque universes, only possible without a million-dollar budget through access to Ai from ivory-tower executives prompting Ai for repetitive ad campaigns designed to scratch consumers’ impulse-buying itch. She went on to state that “Ai is the great equalizer of the art industry” and I realized this is both the truth and biggest moral dilemma of Ai. If you are a member of a historically-excluded population equalizing means finally having access to make your worlds a reality. If you are from a historically-colonizing population equalizing takes on a machiavellian function of drowning out other voices and maintaining power. 

On a personal level, JessicNT uses ChatGPT for things like streamlining a powerpoint because demonstrating the taste to understand how to prompt Ai is quite literally within her job description as a social media manager for major brands–but when she creates her own music she prefers to keep things analog. As a self-taught artist, trading speed for mastery is a trade she’s unwilling to make. When JessicNT described her process of manually mixing and mastering music I immediately thought of Khari Johnson’s advice to Black creatives to “guard your mind.” 

Khari, a Black tech journalist whose Afrofuturism runs so deep he pioneered the reporting on space law, reminded me that “machines can’t draw connections.” The spiritual element of creating simply doesn’t exist in a conscienceless program predicting numbers and patterns. Khari emphasized that even if Black creators use ChatGPT to streamline some tedious parts of their process, we simply must protect The First Draft, the first initial spark that no machine can replicate. I wondered if Black creators tend to use new technology to create entirely new ecosystems, such as our invention of house music, rather than as a hack to replicate existing artworks because we come from a lineage of innovating for survival. 

Listening to Khari discuss the power structure around Ai, I posited even further that our history of inventing the underground railroad in the United States and organizing our communities to overcome colonial powers throughout the globe grounds our approach to Ai. We understand that knowledge is our power, our originality is coveted and that opening our creative processes to Ai requires a delicate balance of staving off the program’s capacity to colonize our ideas. Even as I write this piece, I won’t use ChatGPT. I can’t bear the thought of cheating myself of the opportunity to learn new ways to write and thus betraying my Future Self by robbing her of storytelling mastery. Ultimately, Nick and I opted against using Ai in our film and turned off the use ai to extend your footage feature that now comes standard in the 2025 version of Adobe Premiere. As we discussed how we would or wouldn’t use Ai in our process Nick offered “even if Ai can make the distinction between an oppressive use of its capabilities and a more democratic use, how can it be an ally to us if it is ultimately a part of an oppressive system?” Indeed, the tech autocrats who own Ai are inextricably tied to Ai’s use. 

“Ai is not a neutral tool” Bambii texted in rapid, witty succession adding that “Ai is not a Roland drum machine.” When she answered my facetime call she leapt from discussing the subversiveness of raving to the violative experience of learning that master producer Timbaland has signed his first Ai artist with the same seamlessness she brings to transitioning Clarity by Zedd into one of Goldie’s deep cuts layered over a samba beat. To Bambii, the inevitability of Ai is a reason to examine how and when Ai would be useful in Afrofuturistic world-building, if at all. As one of the few Black female producers on earth, Bambii distinguished tools providing more sonic options to producers from Ai which overtakes the creative process from producers explaining that “Autotune is a subsidiary tool, whereas Ai is an independent tool, which you can think of as a tool the playmaker uses versus a tool replacing the playmaker.” 

Thinking about Ai centralizing the labor and the means of production under the control of a few individuals does admittedly make the hairs on my back stand up. Prior times in human history where a subset of very powerful people held total control of labor and means of production resulted in systems like feudalism, colonialism and slavery. For such a new form of technology Ai is quite traditional, regressive even, when viewed through this labor-aware lens. Before I could be distracted by my own thoughts Bambii brought me back to earth quipping that “Ai cannot copy black innovation but we live in a world where Taylor Swift is famous, the music world is meritless and talent is not deciding things at all.” I giggled, cackled too. 

When we said good-bye I felt hopeful. One of the last things she mentioned really sat with me “the most innovative thing you can do is be more community based, with real people and break the barrier of race and class.” Happily, I can say with certainty that Black creatives are keeping our work based in our shared humanity. Whether forced to adopt ChatGPT in our corporate workflows or simply tempted to see how Ai works, on the whole Black creativity resides still in the analog, in the person-to-person, in the experience of living in our communities. And even when we do use Ai to world-build, we use the tool tactically so that our innovation remains safe from autocrats and empathy-devoid trillionaires. In a world where Ai’s dominance appears inevitable we aren’t threatened. As true innovators and revolutionaries we share a deep knowing to guard our minds within the system we are kicking against. 

My skin still felt damp from the commute. I’d been salivating over the final details of our film during the entire ride down the 2 train and across the L, especially the soundscape. Usually we met at a popular members-only club in Brooklyn for our in-person edit sessions but today my co-directors and I were meeting at their home. The members-only club upped the pricing and thus far I’ve opted against becoming a member to save the money buying me entrance to the “in” crowd to put towards tangible tools like a new camera lens. Plus, the club I dance at is in Brooklyn and it made sense to meet at their home to maximize our time together before I had to start my shift. 

At our last meeting we decided the soundscape needed to be entirely unique to our project, so I wrote a poem in between stage sets and lap dances and asked a friend with a sultry voice to read each stanza and send me an audio recording. We planned on merging her voice with some classical string instruments and pulsing bass to create a soundtrack that is more like a futuristic fever dream than simply “background music.” 

My heart fluttered listening to our mock-up film score cobbled together with copyrighted music, our friend’s warm voice tones and duty-free music available within Adobe Premiere. It worked, and I mean really worked. Our only problem was translating how we needed our soundscape to feel to a foley artist without losing any emotion in translation. I had about twenty minutes left to brainstorm before I risked getting reprimanded for lateness at work so we spit-balled a summary for a sound artist. I subtly entered our adjectives into ChatGPT as my two co-directors listed criteria, just to see what it generated. Uncomfortably, the thinking-machine pushed out a succinct, easy summary we could pass onto our sound designer with five minutes left to spare before I needed to rush around for the second time that day. But–something felt off about the description. Nick, who has worked with the likes of Zendaya, Law Roach, Cash Cobain, and somehow, me, turned and said “I don’t know sis, it’s just corny? Too cookie-cutter for us.” We opted for our own flawed, but honest description to send to our sound designer. 

I felt a twinge of guilt for asking ChatGPT to think for me in the first place, but I also felt relief. In a three-person production team for a film funded solely by lap dances we needed every strategic advantage possible that closes the gap between us and filmmakers funded by studios, what was wrong with testing out the tech? 

As I got dressed in my all-red lingerie for the night I couldn’t help but feel a sense of indignance, knowing in my gut that other independent creatives are experimenting with Ai as a way to maintain artistic integrity rather than to riff or take from others–so when I had a moment between stage sets I DM’d one of my favorite independent artists for research purposes and, frankly, validation.

Jessic_nt (pronounced Jessicunt for those asking) and I had just recently shared a mutual rant about the ethical qualms involved in Black creatives pioneering new technology over drinks at a Brooklyn watering hole, so I felt eager to hear more. JessicNT, who has opened for Kelela (who is perhaps the afrofuturist artist of our time), has an open-mindedness that might just be a reflection of her gemini placements or might just be the kind of adaptive mindset this moment in history requires. “I’ve seen Ai and NFTs in a digital landscape change Black creatives’ lives for the better – but I can’t stop thinking about how much it cooks the planet.” We wondered together, is there a way to square the balance between historically excluded people finally getting access to capital by being first-movers in AI spaces and the tech itself deteriorating our communities? 

Witness, too, how unquestioningly Elon Musk dumps the waste from his Ai-superplant in Boxtown, Memphis a Black neighborhood. To Elon, training Grok at a rapid pace and offering Boxtown tax revenue is worth the formaldehyde poisoning the air, killing residents softly. Very much in accordance with Elon’s post-empathy universe, the benefit to a few will always outweigh the harm to many (Musk’s team did not respond to my request for comment on the impact of his plant on Boxtown’s Black community). Jessic_nt doesn’t want to add any scaffolding to the post-human world the richest man on earth hopes he can create. 

And yet–the world building Black artists are already doing with Ai is unique, powerful, and understands Ai as a tool in creating worlds that are for us, and by us rather than as an efficiency hack. Jessic_nt distinguishes Black creators creating wakanda-eque universes, only possible without a million-dollar budget through access to Ai from ivory-tower executives prompting Ai for repetitive ad campaigns designed to scratch consumers’ impulse-buying itch. She went on to state that “Ai is the great equalizer of the art industry” and I realized this is both the truth and biggest moral dilemma of Ai. If you are a member of a historically-excluded population equalizing means finally having access to make your worlds a reality. If you are from a historically-colonizing population equalizing takes on a machiavellian function of drowning out other voices and maintaining power. 

On a personal level, JessicNT uses ChatGPT for things like streamlining a powerpoint because demonstrating the taste to understand how to prompt Ai is quite literally within her job description as a social media manager for major brands–but when she creates her own music she prefers to keep things analog. As a self-taught artist, trading speed for mastery is a trade she’s unwilling to make. When JessicNT described her process of manually mixing and mastering music I immediately thought of Khari Johnson’s advice to Black creatives to “guard your mind.” 

Khari, a Black tech journalist whose Afrofuturism runs so deep he pioneered the reporting on space law, reminded me that “machines can’t draw connections.” The spiritual element of creating simply doesn’t exist in a conscienceless program predicting numbers and patterns. Khari emphasized that even if Black creators use ChatGPT to streamline some tedious parts of their process, we simply must protect The First Draft, the first initial spark that no machine can replicate. I wondered if Black creators tend to use new technology to create entirely new ecosystems, such as our invention of house music, rather than as a hack to replicate existing artworks because we come from a lineage of innovating for survival. 

Listening to Khari discuss the power structure around Ai, I posited even further that our history of inventing the underground railroad in the United States and organizing our communities to overcome colonial powers throughout the globe grounds our approach to Ai. We understand that knowledge is our power, our originality is coveted and that opening our creative processes to Ai requires a delicate balance of staving off the program’s capacity to colonize our ideas. Even as I write this piece, I won’t use ChatGPT. I can’t bear the thought of cheating myself of the opportunity to learn new ways to write and thus betraying my Future Self by robbing her of storytelling mastery. Ultimately, Nick and I opted against using Ai in our film and turned off the use ai to extend your footage feature that now comes standard in the 2025 version of Adobe Premiere. As we discussed how we would or wouldn’t use Ai in our process Nick offered “even if Ai can make the distinction between an oppressive use of its capabilities and a more democratic use, how can it be an ally to us if it is ultimately a part of an oppressive system?” Indeed, the tech autocrats who own Ai are inextricably tied to Ai’s use. 

“Ai is not a neutral tool” Bambii texted in rapid, witty succession adding that “Ai is not a Roland drum machine.” When she answered my facetime call she leapt from discussing the subversiveness of raving to the violative experience of learning that master producer Timbaland has signed his first Ai artist with the same seamlessness she brings to transitioning Clarity by Zedd into one of Goldie’s deep cuts layered over a samba beat. To Bambii, the inevitability of Ai is a reason to examine how and when Ai would be useful in Afrofuturistic world-building, if at all. As one of the few Black female producers on earth, Bambii distinguished tools providing more sonic options to producers from Ai which overtakes the creative process from producers explaining that “Autotune is a subsidiary tool, whereas Ai is an independent tool, which you can think of as a tool the playmaker uses versus a tool replacing the playmaker.” 

Thinking about Ai centralizing the labor and the means of production under the control of a few individuals does admittedly make the hairs on my back stand up. Prior times in human history where a subset of very powerful people held total control of labor and means of production resulted in systems like feudalism, colonialism and slavery. For such a new form of technology Ai is quite traditional, regressive even, when viewed through this labor-aware lens. Before I could be distracted by my own thoughts Bambii brought me back to earth quipping that “Ai cannot copy black innovation but we live in a world where Taylor Swift is famous, the music world is meritless and talent is not deciding things at all.” I giggled, cackled too. 

When we said good-bye I felt hopeful. One of the last things she mentioned really sat with me “the most innovative thing you can do is be more community based, with real people and break the barrier of race and class.” Happily, I can say with certainty that Black creatives are keeping our work based in our shared humanity. Whether forced to adopt ChatGPT in our corporate workflows or simply tempted to see how Ai works, on the whole Black creativity resides still in the analog, in the person-to-person, in the experience of living in our communities. And even when we do use Ai to world-build, we use the tool tactically so that our innovation remains safe from autocrats and empathy-devoid trillionaires. In a world where Ai’s dominance appears inevitable we aren’t threatened. As true innovators and revolutionaries we share a deep knowing to guard our minds within the system we are kicking against.