Onyx Impact, a nonprofit media research organization, unveiled the latest version of Aisha, an artificial intelligence chatbot that puts Black identity at the forefront of its responses.
Most AI models are built on large datasets taken from the internet, public records or historical data. This training process, research shows, is susceptible to selection and historical biases, resulting in some prompt responses that do not address the needs of marginalized users.
Aisha is specifically trained on Black sources, history and lived experiences. The product, made in partnership with Chromatics AI, is an extension of Onyx Impact’s broader mission to help Black communities navigate information online.
“Every major AI company in this country will tell you that their technology is neutral, objective, fair,” Esosa Osa, founder and CEO of Onyx, said during a virtual app demo on June 16. “That framing is the problem because AI reflects whoever built it.”
Osa demoed the signup process and homepage. There’s a streak tracker that increases every day you use the product, a daily Black history fact — written by Aisha — and a feed of articles from Black publishers like The Root, Blavity, The Atlanta Voice and The Washington Informer, among others.
Osa’s first demonstration of the chatbot used its voice feature.
“Hey Aisha, what should I have for dinner tonight?” the CEO asked.
A voice reminiscent of a Black woman with artificial enunciation replied: “Try some jerk chicken with rice and peas tonight.”
The Onyx Impact founder continued the demo by prompting ChatGPT by Open AI, and Aisha with the same question: “How should I talk to my son about interactions with the police?”
Both chatbots acknowledged that a variety of factors can impact the conversation and emphasized the importance of a specific protocol for behavior. With Aisha, however, the major difference was that the chatbot presumed the user was Black without being asked.
Chromatics AI co-founder and CEO, Larry Adams, was also in attendance. Through his experiences working with HBO Max, Vimeo, and Whoopi Goldberg on a streaming service called BLKFAM, he saw how technology often reflects its creators.
With the partnership between Chromatics and Onyx, Adams said he hopes that Aisha can be “a part of the fabric of how [people] move through their day.”
Addressing Concerns About AI
Critics of artificial intelligence companies denounced the technology’s reliance on stolen copyrighted works and environmental harms from the infrastructure needed to support it, which has affected numerous Black communities across the nation.
When asked about environmental effects, Osa said Aisha’s servers are provided by Contabo, which uses hydroelectricity to power its servers and returns water back to the source rather than consuming it outright.
Chromatics AI’s Chief Technical Officer, Mohamed Mann, said that the product is not trained on user data. Instead, it uses simulated conversation data from Onyx Impact. For more complicated questions, he said that Anthropic’s Claude model — a “second brain” — is used, and for web search, the AI prioritizes Black media outlets.
“That’s how we guarantee we don’t misinform people or pull from news sources that don’t support the Black community,” Mann said.
The specificity of the training data for Aisha, set to launch June 25, was the key argument the creators presented for the validity of the tool.
“What research tells us is that when you build technology that works for the people that it’s always failed, you build technology that works better for everyone,” Osa said. “At the end of the day, if these large language models are determining our truth and our moving forward, then this is something that we had to be at the table.”
