At first, John Pasmore was excited about ChatGPT.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The serial founder had been in the artificial intelligence space since at least 2008. He recalled the days when experts declared it would take decades before the world saw anything like a ChatGPT. Fast-forward \u2014 that day has now come.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But there is a catch.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ChatGPT,\u00a0one of the world\u2019s most powerful artificial intelligence tools, struggles with cultural nuance. That\u2019s quite annoying for a Black person like Pasmore. In fact, this oversight has evoked the ire of many Black people who already did not see themselves properly represented in the algorithms touted to one day save the world. The current ChatGPT offers answers that are too generalized for specific questions that cater to certain communities, as its training appears Eurocentric and Western in its bias. This is not unique \u2014 most AI models are not built with people of color in mind.\u00a0 But many Black founders are adamant not to be left behind.<\/p>\n
Numerous Black-owned ChatGPT versions have popped up in the past year to cater specifically to Black and brown communities, as Black founders, like Pasmore, seek to capitalize on OpenAI\u2019s cultural slip.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you ask the model generally who are some of the most important artists in our culture, it will give you Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo,\u201d Pasmore said of ChatGPT. \u201cIt\u2019s not going to say anything about India or China, Africa, or even African Americans, because it has a bias that is focused on the European trajectory of history.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
So Pasmore launched Latimer.AI<\/a>, a language model to give answers tailored to reflect the experiences of Black and brown people. Erin Reddick started ChatBlackGPT,<\/a> a chatbot also centered on Black and brown communities. Globally there is the Canada-based Spark Plug<\/a>, which is essentially a ChatGPT for Black and brown students. Africa is also seeing vast innovation in this space, with language models popping up to cater to the more than 2,000 languages and dialects spoken on the continent that Western AI models still overlook.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are the keepers of our own stories and experiences,\u201d Tamar Huggins, the founder of Spark Plug, told TechCrunch. \u201cWe need to create systems and infrastructure, that we own and control, to ensure our data remains ours.\u201d<\/p>\n Generalized AI models cannot easily capture the African American experience because many aspects of that culture are not online. Current algorithms scrape the internet for sourcing, but many traditions and dialects within African American culture are passed down orally or firsthand, leaving a gap in what an AI model will understand<\/a> about the community versus the nuance in what actually happens.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is one reason why Pasmore tried to use sources like Amsterdam News, one of the oldest Black newspapers in the U.S., while building Latimer.AI, focusing on accuracy rather than training on user-generated data scraped from the internet. Doing this, he started to see differences between his model and ChatGPT\u2019s.\u00a0<\/p>\n He once asked ChatGPT about the Underground Railroad, the passage that enslaved Black Americans used to travel to Northern states to escape from slavery. ChatGPT\u2019s model would mention runaway slaves, whereas Latimer.AI\u2019s adjusted the wording, referring to the \u201censlaved\u201d or \u201cfreedom-seeking people,\u201d which is more in line with what has become more socially attuned while discussing the formerly enslaved.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou have some subtle differences in the language that the model uses because of the training data, and the model itself just thinks about Black and brown people,\u201d Pasmore said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Erin Reddick\u2019s ChatBlackGPT is still in beta mode with plans to launch on Juneteenth. Her product works the way it sounds: a chatbot where one can ask questions and receive tailored responses about Black culture. \u201cThe core of what we\u2019re doing is true community-driven,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n She\u2019s in the process of building out the tool, asking users<\/a> what they want it to look like and how they want it to act. She\u2019s also teaming up with education institutions like historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to work with students to both teach and have them help train her algorithm. She said she wants to \u201cmake a well-rounded learning opportunity for Black and brown people to have a safe space to explore AI.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe algorithm prioritizes Black information sources so that it can speak to a body of knowledge that is more immediately relatable than your average experience,\u201d she told TechCrunch, adding that, like Pasmore\u2019s product, technically anyone can use it.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Tamar Huggins built Spark Plug<\/a> to also offer a more tailored experience to Black and brown communities.\u00a0Her platform translates educational material into African American Vernacular English (AAVE), the ethnolect associated with Black American communities. That dialect is traditionally passed down orally and firsthand rather than studied and written down like standard English, meaning the accuracy of an AI model (or person) learning it from just the internet<\/a> will falter in precision<\/a>. Capturing AAVE accurately is important, not just so the GPT will respond using it, but also so students can more easily write prompts that will have the AI return the results they need.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cBy creating content that resonates with Black students, we ensure they see themselves in education, which is critical for high engagement and academic success,\u201d Huggins said. \u201cWhen given the opportunity, Big Tech will almost always prioritize profits over people. So we created our own lane within the AI space.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Huggins trained her algorithm on texts like Shakespeare, alongside the writings of Black authors from the Harlem Renaissance, and even the verbiage of her teenage daughter to capture the essence of AAVE. Huggins also works with educators, linguists, and cultural experts to review and validate Spark Plug\u2019s outputs. <\/p>\n Pasmore is also working to expand his company into schools, especially HBCUs, as more students look to ChatGPT every day to complete their work.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a better AI companion for a lot of the work Black and brown kids are tasked to do,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Africa is seeing itself overlooked in the current AI movement. For example, only 0.77% of the world\u2019s total AI journals stem from sub-Saharan Africa, compared to East Asia and North America at 47.1% and 11.6%, respectively, according to a 2023 Artificial Intelligence Index Report<\/a>. Population-wise, compared to North America, Africa constitutes around 17% of the world\u2019s population, compared to just 7% of North America. When it\u2019s time to pull information and experts about AI, the odds of research from sub-Saharan being used are quite low, which could impact the development of global AI tools. <\/p>\n While Africa is seeing a lot of development in creating more inclusive language models that better serve the Black diaspora, right now, current AI models from ChatGPT to Gemini cannot fully support the more than 2,000 languages spoken across Africa.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yinka Iyinolakan created CDIAL.AI<\/a> to address this. CDIAL.AI is a chatbot that can speak and understand nearly all of the African languages and dialects, with a particular focus on speech patterns rather than text.\u00a0<\/p>\n Iyinolakan echoed to TechCrunch the same sentiment many Black Americans did \u2014 that foundational AI models are scraped primarily on internet data and from the most commonly spoken languages.\u00a0Like its African American progeny culture, many African languages and traditions are absent from the internet, as it is a culture historically communicated orally rather than in written form. This means AI models do not have enough information on African cultures to train themselves, thus leaving a knowledge gap.\u00a0<\/p>\n For CDIAL.AI, Iyinolakan brought in more than 1,200 native speakers and linguists across Africa to collect knowledge and insights to build what he hails \u201cthe world\u2019s first multi-lingual voice-first large language model.\u201d The company plans to expand in the next 12 months to include even more languages and build a model to support text, voices, and images.<\/p>\n He isn\u2019t alone here. Google recently gave the Kenya-based Jacaranda Health a $1.4 million grant to build out its machine learning services so it can work in more African languages and Intron Health recently raised several million dollars to scale its clinical speech recognition for the over 200 accents spoken across Africa.<\/p>\n \u201cSilicon Valley wants to believe that it is the be-all and end-all for artificial intelligence,\u201d\u00a0Iyinolakan said. \u201cBut to \u2018get\u2019 artificial intelligence, which is what all the companies have as their north star, they need to include a third of the world\u2019s knowledge.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Taking on AI chatbots is not the only innovation Black founders are trying to tackle.\u00a0<\/p>\nPersonalized AI is here<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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![\"Image](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Screenshot-2024-06-13-at-12.44.53\u202fPM.png?w=680\")
Uniting the diaspora<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Making headway<\/strong><\/h2>\n