The Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab was one of the sponsors for the 2025 AI Symposium: Fear, Faith, and Praxis: Artificial Intelligence in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Michigan State University. I was honored to present alongside my colleague Dr. Lonny J. Avi Brooks from California State University East Bay. Dr. Brooks is a communication and Foresight scholar specializing in Afrofuturist future thinking. Given the current nature of things, I thought bringing an Afrofuturist perspective to the current dialogue about Generative AI was important.
I wrote/ imagined using generative AI tools as part of my presentation. This is not new; I’ve been using AI tools with students in my Integrated Arts and Humanities (IAH) course on Afrofuturism to demystify the technology. Working alongside the graduate teaching assistants for the course, my approach is to think about the ways generative AI tools offer the latest informational transformation that asks us (teachers) to consider essential questions about what and how we are teaching. For me, the challenge of generative AI is similar to how students’ use of Wikipedia seemingly offered a crisis more than a decade ago.
I use the past tense because no one, at least no one I know, suggests Wikipedia will put professors out of work anymore. In my work with students, I’ve stressed AI as a developmental tool and pushed them to think about how the different tools arrive at the information they provide. For me, generative AI’s true challenge is information fluency and literacy. Ethical and moral questions become very clear when we understand how the information created falls short, how that failure can lead to bad outcomes, and what efforts we might take to provide better solutions from these tools. The confidence created by the outputs from the new generation of AI tools means that we must impart skills to the public to evaluate and analyze information sources and nurture the capability to recognize possible harm and the need to increase care related to our collective information ecosystem. The emphasis on a developmental approach to the information offered in my general education course does not mean, as a person with an interest in technology and practice, I do not see potential for interesting experimentation. As part of my presentation, I developed “The Afrofuturist Laws for Generative AI” using four Large Language Models (LLM). These laws blend the general information about Afrofuturism online, which is an interesting digital reality to ponder. As a cultural movement, significant writing and activism about Afrofuturism are available on the open web. That material allows these models to capture crucial ideas linked to the Afrofuturim. Nonetheless, I refined these outputs using my presentation, allowing the models to merge that general information with my essay to arrive at their suggestions. Finally, using multiple LLMs highlights how each model offers subtle differences that users should consider as they approach the tool.
The presentation by Dr. Brooks and I received generally favorable responses, and we continue to discuss the value of the Afrofuturist perspective as we face the current challenges in higher education and beyond.
Dr. Julian Chambliss, Co-Director, Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab
