Griot and Grits is preserving Black history through AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quickly paving the way for technological innovation across countless industries and has infiltrated many of our day-to-day activities–especially in education. Educational institutions have increasingly adopted AI technology in the spirit of innovating teaching and learning practices and providing greater access to educational resources. History, for example, is a core subject that can benefit from the use of AI to enrich and synthesize the context of historical events, figures and movements as additional background information and sources are uncovered–and Red Hat is helping make it happen. 

The Griot and Grits Project

Red Hat is thrilled to announce the launch of the Griot and Grits Project, an open source project developed in collaboration with cultural experts, educational leaders and institutions, including  Shaw University and the Mass Open Cloud, to leverage the power of AI and open source and preserve Black history that would otherwise be lost. The project, named for the historical West African griot who was responsible for orally passing down village history, was created to build a community of technologists, esteemed historians and African American leaders dedicated to enhancing and preserving Black stories, one voice at a time, through the use of cutting-edge AI technology. 

The unique initiative combines the power of AI and digital storytelling with the richness of cultural heritage, creating a platform where families can share and archive their narratives. The project not only celebrates the past, but also inspires future generations to connect with their history. There is an aging generation of African Americans who lived through significant historical milestones, but are without a platform upon which to share their experiences. 

Via AI-enhanced content, Griot and Grits aims to:

• Create a comprehensive, searchable library of recorded oral and video accounts of the lives of African Americans.
• Highlight key events from the recorded content and associate them with similar events to create a richer story.
• Generate a geographical representation of the stories to allow individuals to search by location.
• Recreate a documentary-like view of individual stories to augment key events with additional relevant background information, photos and videos.
• Build referencable family chapters for individuals to find out more about their unique family history.

Innovation through collaboration

To accomplish all of this, the project leverages AI-enabled Red Hat products and collaborative allies, such as Red Hat OpenShift AI running in the Mass Open Cloud, a low-cost research-based cloud born out of a relationship between academic researchers, research centers, government and industry. The Griot and Grits community will provide guidance and technology to help families capture and catalog videos, audio, and important historical documents to a centralized repository that extracts metadata and key events from the uploaded content using AI.

Once the content is in the repository, open source AI models will enrich the data and fill in the gaps with information, videos, audio and pictures from public domains like museums and libraries . Working alongside these public entities will provide access to important Black history archives, which will also be used to train the project’s AI models. Open source generative AI (gen AI) models will be utilized to create enriched content such as video, pictures, key event summarizations and AI narrators that will make family stories more engaging and relatable. The result will be an index of searchable content based on the metadata and key events, allowing users to explore Black history through a search engine or visual geographic map. 

The project also marks an expansion of Red Hat’s work with Shaw University, a historically Black university located just moments away from Red Hat’s headquarters in downtown Raleigh, NC. For the first time, Shaw University students will have the opportunity to work alongside historians, open source technologists and Red Hat associates in the Griot and Grits community to earn valuable experience with AI and open source technologies. Red Hat’s Blacks United in Leadership and Diversity (B.U.I.L.D.) community , an employee resource group, began the alliance with Shaw University in 2020 to use student talent and mentor the next generation of open source experts.

The use of AI to replicate the sights and sounds of the places and times of the past is an exciting use of innovative, open source technology. For more information about Griot and Grits, please visit https://www.griotandgrits.org. We also invite you to get involved by joining the community and contributing via GitHub, as volunteers are essential to the success of this project. The community is dedicated to making the captured stories publicly accessible in the upcoming months.