MICROSOFT MULTICULTURAL
The Microsoft Multicultural team received an RFP whose aim was at coming up with social content, ideas that would best identify with the Black community. Interested not in one off mentions, like a single post for Black History Month of Juneteenth, but real content that Black people could enjoy throughout the year and find value in.
The Ask:
I was tasked as an Art Director to think of culturally relevant and pragmatic ways to speak to the Black community about topics surrounding the tech space.
With this project arising around lots of talk surrounding AI, Chat GPT, etc, I thought it would be interested to center my ideas around technology still in early phases of development but that were being highlighted as major movers in culture, the way we work, and how the world evolves.
My Role:
CODE SWITCH
CODE SWITCH
For many, AI is talked about as the “way of the future,” but the question is who’s future? In a field that highlights the power and potential of new technologies it is evident that Black people seem to have been largely left out of its design.
Problem
AI image generators tend to perpetuate the same negative stereotypes and biases that Black people face in the real world, because it taps into what already exists on the internet.
Insight
Introducing Microsoft’s inclusive AI Board, a group of Black artists, cultural tastemakers, and historians who will test, break and evolve Dalle-E 2. Made up of those with a deep understanding of Black culture and how it should best be visualized, we’ll invite those like Kehinde Wiley, Carrie Mae Weems, Everette Taylor or Pharrell Williams to help train a more inclusive AI.
Execution
How it Works
An Invite to Expose & Change
We will invite our AI Board to use Dall-E 2 and highlight the limitations of the platform, like bias, stereotypical depictions, etc., and submit our findings to Microsoft.
Prompting a Revolution
Because it takes time to evolve the platform, in the near-term our Board will publish an interactive tool that will help write prompts that tap into Black artists (I.e., Kara Walker), Black Art movements (I.e., Afrofuturism), AAVE and other colloquialisms unique to the Black community so users are able to generate representative, diverse, culturally rich images.
Being Open to Influence
Open AI is not currently open source and can't be trained outside of its own engineers. We would advocate that we open up Dall-E 2 to be trained by the inputs from our interaction prompt tool.
PRAISE
PRAISE
This idea helped win the RFP !
And while this specific idea did not get chosen to get made, it is ideas like this that I am passionate about building and bringing to the real world, because they are needed, it just takes the right client, time and courage to bring them to life.
“This is work we should be doing (speaking of Code Switch specifically).”
— Client
“The pitch went awesome. Some texts from the client that our Account lead just sent through: included the words “epic” “there’s no comparison” “your work is top tier,” thanks for all your killer ideas.”
- Matt Zavala EVP, Executive Creative Director at Edelman