The Cookout AI APPROACH

The Cookout AI approach is outlined in The Cookout: A Guide to AI (Ancestral Intelligence), a comic workbook and guide for storytellers, community organizers, researchers, and other leaders. The comic book narrative is an Afrofuturist tale set in a corporate dystopia that helps readers understand how media and technology can harm, and the guide offers prompts for them to write in and brainstorm how to work collectively towards repair.

The Cookout narrates a future we can create together: a Black and indigenous platform for reimagining supply chains for stories and knowledge. Each chapter reimagines an aspect of how corporations cultivate stories and knowledge. These chapters are instructive and interactive. I ask the questions we must answer to host a Cookout. I briefly share how I answered them and invite you to write in and do the same.

THE COOKOUT PROCESS

Framing AI through the cookout prompts critical questions:

Development: Who is invited, and how?

The Cookout is first and foremost about solidarity. When we ask who’s invited to the cookout, we are really asking if the people attending care about us, how the platform (the cookout) is developing a hospitable container for our connection.

Production: Who is cooking, and what?

It’s a cookout. The food draws people to gather. Conversations around who’s invited to the cookout often start with what we expect them to bring. The process of producing culture is as important as the product made. On the Cookout AI, users are invited to share something specific: their recipes for liberation. We believe this cultivates the most useful data and reparative AI.

Distribution: Who is serving, and why?

Platforms serve communities by distributing culture. Most communities forge connections through specific rituals and practices cultivated over time. It matters why platforms are serving, the intention and legacies behind the gathering. The Cookout AI platform is managed using ancestral protocols for gathering. Content is developed through the cycles of the earth and with consistent programming (public conversations, podcasts, games, and prompts) inspired by community-based knowledges.

Exhibition: Who is hosting and where?

Hosts curate platforms for community engagement. It is a powerful position, deciding who is invited and what will be served. At the cookout, hosts manage this power by being as open as possible, defining borders through shifting connections. Every user of the Cookout AI is a host and has a set number of invites. This encourages users to be clear about who will bring the most value to the app, who will generate the highest quality and most healing stories and data.

Research: How do we understand and cultivate community better next time?

The cookout is about how we nurture each other, and we can always do it better. Nobody does it perfectly, just as healing is not linear. Everyday hosts conduct organic forms of research on their programming. Simply, they ask. The Cookout AI is ongoing experiment co-created by users, whose consistent feedback will inform our proctols and story/data gathering practices.