Grace Ewura-Esi:

You're listening to Traceroute, a podcast about the inner workings of our digital world. I'm Grace Ewura-Esi.

Shweta Saraf:

I'm Shweta Saraf.

Amy Tobey:

I'm Amy Tobey.

Fen Aldrich:

And I'm Fen Aldrich.

Grace Ewura-Esi:

This is the first time that we've all gathered here like this simultaneously. It's giving the Planeteers. It's like everyone is here.

Amy Tobey:

We got the band back together.

Fen Aldrich:

We're getting the band back together. That's right.

Shweta Saraf:

I love you said Planeteers.

Grace Ewura-Esi:

Exactly. I love the Planeteers. They're my favorite. So I've been on the internet which saying that in a room full of technologists, I'm sure we're all nodding our heads and I stumbled across what is lovingly known sometimes as native IG or native TikTok where Indigenous and native peoples are having conversations about their respective identities, their tribal heritage, and I started noticing this one artist, I think they do non-digital mediums but they are actually Igbo and the Igbo people are a tribe in what is now today modern Nigeria and who, during the time of forced enslavement in North Central and South America as well as Europe, their culture was spread all throughout the world, especially the belief in their gods. And they've been asking AI questions that they then get a visual response to via Midjourney.

I think this is a great place to pause and ask someone to volunteer themselves as tribute to explain what Midjourney is.

Fen Aldrich:

I can give my best understanding of it, but I'm not super deep into the AI world. We did mess around with something, not Midjourney. What's the one that we just messed around with?

Uh, was it Stable Diffusion? I think so. Um, I mean, all of these are generative AI, but like any of them, they're really just like, here is a bunch of data, and then I'm gonna ask you about it and give me your best guess of what I'm actually asking you for, right? Like, based on all of this other information. But some are really interesting because you can keep refining after you get an image and be like, "Okay, take that now as your base and change it in this way," and so people can get some really impressive, like actual art out of it after continuing to refine over and over again, the output that it gives rather than just having it start over from random noise.

Amy Tobey:

The other part is that you can ask it to do things in the style of a living artist and this has become very problematic in that most of these models have ingested art from living artists.

Fen Aldrich:

True. And a lot of them, you can ask the style, you can ask further information about it to refine that. So you can be like, "Draw me a picture of..." To your point, history, right? So you can ask for a picture of someone hunting a mammoth in the style of van Gogh, right? You can do these weird things like that or like, "Show me a catch in the style of H.R. Giger," and really see what nonsense you can get.

Grace Ewura-Esi:

When I was looking at some of the things that I was seeing, something that I had to keep in mind was this piece, and that's the natural language processing element. It's a text prompt in a Discord bot that actually creates these images.

So someone has to type in, you know, "Show me Igbo gods," and then it renders them something. For example, we've got the god Agwu Nsi who we're looking at right now. And he's got a lot of beautiful ornamentation, chocolate-brown skin, high cheekbones, golden eyes.

I'm talking about gold eyes, gold highlights in his cheeks. It's looking like some really great highlighter from Fenty. We've got gold highlights into the hairline over the brow bone, a full beard, and this really intricate hairstyle that is chocolate brown and looks a little bit like a wood carving.

It really made me think that this representation of Agwu Nsi that we are looking at is so much in alignment with the actual artifacts that exist of this god and totems that exist in shrines today, and how this image is really emerging of those sorts of physical pieces with most likely images of what Igbo people or Nigerians look like in 2023. It's just really interesting to see how this representation is being brought to life here in MidJourney. And it has made me think more deeply about how technology can play a part and a role in helping us not just make new discoveries but go back to old ones and really understand what they can mean for us today.

So I want to use that as my way of opening up the story. What did you all think or feel as you saw that?

Fen Aldrich:

Yeah. I've got mixed feelings about all of it. I've always been ambivalent whenever AI comes in because I love it as this creative process of exploring. I want to see these things that I have seen but angled in a certain way, that involve characters that are personal to me or that involve culture that I haven't seen but I still want to see these gods as someone would've depicted but from my culture, not from Norse mythology. We already have Thor. And so, I have this mixed feeling of like, "Oh, but this is just taking a modern look at all of these new variables that we're trying to throw at it." But also, how exciting that is for people that can see themselves represented in a place that they haven't before? It is a kind of creative process. But at the same time, I have this back worry in my brain of the way that this drives all style and drives all substance and drives all creativity to a most common denominator type of thing also worries me, right? I love the things that come out of nowhere in my brains and other brains of like, "Hey, I just made this weird connection and it makes no sense and it's completely out there and this would've gotten pruned from any AI model but I think it's interesting and worth following," and we get new and interesting things out of that. So that's where I come to when I see these images generated and hear these stories of making this new thing and also see more and more AI creation starting to show up.

Amy Tobey:

So when I look at this, what I see is the way that these models work is they take millions or billions, sometimes tens of billions of parameters. When you say, "Draw me these people from this mythology or history or whatever," it'll go and choose those billions of parameters. And then, that is what is used to generate the images that we see. Those billions of parameters are created by taking all the text and all the images that these things can download and hoover through their systems. And so, what we see is maybe a little bit of a lie in that it's not actually probably anything like what those ancient folks look like. But there is a projection there of human imagination in that these models were trained on the images from human imagination, from the art of artists all over the internet, from photographs taken from across cultures and across the earth. And so, when it does that projection into the past, it isn't quite the truth but it does, as I think Grace was hoping for, give us some hints as to what might be in those gaps in our histories.

Shweta Saraf:

I have a slightly different take on this. When I saw the MidJourney video, my first reaction was curiosity. And the creator in me got excited because this was not possible. I mean, AI has existed but the generative part of it or how do you apply it today to do these kind of things and create things which were not existing in that shape or form. I mean, for a moment, I allowed myself to indulge and think that a creator in me would be really happy if I'm able to have these kind of tools and have the responsibility of using them. But I think it's a double-edged sword. It opens up the doors like Fen was alluding to, right? Like, what do you feed into this and what do you get out of it and how do you use it as a tool for a good outcome versus letting it become a tool which can destroy things?

Grace Ewura-Esi:

Yeah. And this, to me, is what you just said, Shweta. It's that double-edged sword like here is something that we have not seen and it's now being brought to life in a way that we haven't seen before and it's really that fine line of, "Well, is this fact, is this fiction, or is it actually a way for us to reveal what was known but is no longer known because of how history has worked?" Especially for people who are missing that part of their history, people like me. If our listeners have been paying attention to some of the episodes, they might know that I'm originally from Ghana, West Africa in the capital city, Accra, and I spent a lot of my childhood being very "Ghanaian" but a lot of what I felt was my Ghanaian-ess is also what I feel to be very commonplace in a lot of people who identify as being native or Indigenous to a lot of other places and in looking deeper into my own history, my own understanding of my heritage, I began to introspect these ancient symbols that are a part of our tradition, this ancient writing system that's a pictographic symbolic system called the Adinkra. All Ghanaians know about the Adinkra but very few of us know their point of origin, very few of us know their evolution, and very few of us know even who, today in this moment, stamps them and makes them and I began asking my parents a lot of questions about them. I was like, "Tell me more about the symbols. Tell me about the myths that they're derived from," and my parents were supportive but they could only offer me so much information. They would say stuff like, "We don't know." A lot of the history that they had a lot of awareness of would go back as far as the 1700s. But yet, our tribes are believed to be thousands of years old and yet my parents couldn't go back further than what we know as modern history and I kept hitting this wall in better trying to understand these symbols beyond just the representations they exist in today. I thought, "I need to go back in search of myself, figure out if I could fill in some of these gaps by clinging to the stories and meeting the people who might have more stories for me," and that could only be done in the origination point of my culture. Ghana is now very popular. It's become very much a metropolitan hub and what I think I love the most about Ghana is not necessarily new Ghana, it's old Ghana. It's crowded streets. It's marketplaces with bustling noises. It's elders and bright, bright cloth with stencils and traditional ornamentation. It's leather sandals, clicking and clacking on dirt roads, traffic because the cows are crossing because the shepherds are moving their cows from one grazing ground to another. It's the magic of what I call dust in the air and some of that is being replaced with modern things: paved roads, fancy shoes that are not animal hide sandals and things like that and I really went in search of the past in a place that was very rapidly becoming the future.

Shweta Saraf:

That was such a beautiful story, transported me back to my origins. I grew up learning Vedas. Vedas are ancient Indian scriptures. There are four Vedas and even though they were written at some point, they are mostly passed on from generation to generation by chanting them and reading them and by the power of the voice and memory so I just wanted to share that.

Grace Ewura-Esi:

Yeah, Shweta. I think that really speaks to the universal nature, I think, of intangibles and how we spread the intangibles even if they are tied to something that you can see like an Adinkra or that you can hear like a Veda. It becomes a part of you through some method of transmission. It makes me wonder though, if we don't transmit them in those ways, do we lose them because they're written in Sanskrit, correct?

Shweta Saraf:

Yes.

Grace Ewura-Esi:

But how many people in today's world who may be, on a daily basis, chanting mantras or utilizing the truths of the Vedas to shepherd their life and give them meaning and direction and deep purpose can read Sanskrit or write it and do you think anything is lost in the inability to do so?

Shweta Saraf:

Yeah. I mean, truly, that number is shrinking by the second and Sanskrit is one of the most ancient languages in this world. I learned it in school so I professionally learned it but also learned it at home by listening. That was faster for me.

Grace Ewura-Esi:

Let's bring it back to our conversation about Midjourney and the role of AI. If let's say there's AI technology that can consume Vedas and create new ones. Is that strange? Is that culturally inappropriate? Is that uncomfortable? How would that make you feel? How do you think people from your culture would feel? Is it okay?

Shweta Saraf:

Yeah. So I have such a deep feeling about this, right? The first reaction is, "It's not okay." It's culturally inappropriate because Vedas are not a thing which evolve. It's more like the answers are hidden in the past. You need to know your past to channel where the future goes but the technologies that we are talking about can help us go deeper. But one thing I do want to say is the double-edged sword nature of this troubles me a lot too because I feel like with AI, with large language models, there is a way to reinforce existing biases based on what data are you feeding it, right? Who controls that? Who regulates that? Just as an example, I tried this AI for creating self-portraits which are meant to be of photographic quality and you pay $20, you get 100 self-portraits. For me, I couldn't even use 5 of those 100 pictures because AI today is just not inclusive. There are not enough data points that the AI models are trained on someone from a South Asian origin, even though there are billions of us on this world.

Amy Tobey:

And the culture of my people, the colonizers, what we do is absorb what's there and make it new again. We discover these things and then we write a scientific paper about it and like, "Look what I invented," and I think that keeps going with a lot of the generative models that we're looking at, especially when we talk about recovering parts of our history. So my guess is that if we took Midjourney or any one of these models that have been trained on today's modern datasets and we generate some new Adinkra or any other symbols from any other cultures, we're going to get a mix of that culture as best as it could be guessed by the ML model and Marvel or DC Comics, right? And so, we will get interesting things that will look probably very close to things that our ancestors might have invented, in fact did, but maybe not directly into that culture that we're trying to study. And so, maybe that's where the danger lies is being misled from truth to something that looks very truth-y.

Fen Aldrich:

Yeah. I think that's the challenge in looking at it to look back. It can't do whole cloth creation. It's all based on patterns and everything you've seen and everything that seems likely and based on all of this information, "What do you think it would look like?" Even think is a misnomer here. I don't like that word because they're not doing that. They're just doing pattern recognition and regurgitation based on a prompt and I think that's important to keep in mind when we're looking at AI models, especially for trying to discover something, is that they're not going to find something new so much as put together something that seems to make sense based of everything they have been trained on.

Grace Ewura-Esi:

I'm fascinated by where this conversation is going and I'm going to tell you why. I'm fascinated because I have come to the conclusion that what everyone is describing is what's actually happening.

Amy Tobey:

Totally agree.

Grace Ewura-Esi:

So I've been working on an independent research paper for the last two years. This is what started this whole entire journey home that's focused on better understanding what the Adinkra actually are. There's three potential stories about the history of the Adinkra stemming from the 1400s but nothing further than that inside of historical narratives written by people who, quite frankly, are neither members of our tribe or even West African. Its history as told through the vantage of people who came and discovered us, right? So a lot of the material you find on the Adinkra are told from the lens of an outsider looking in. In the last 30 years, there's been books written by members of the Confederation of the Akan who are trying to reclaim their own history and stories, usually told from the vantage of textiles because the Adinkra are usually stamped on cloth, carved into metal and wood, and/or made into bronze and gold jewelry. I went to Kumasi which is the seat of the Ashanti Empire because the Ashanti are the ones who hold the Adinkra. And so, I went to the Adinkra Museum in hopes of meeting makers of Adinkra. That sounds grandiose. It's a small building that's mostly an outdoor patio, a little rundown. It's dusty and not that magic dusty, but that not been loved and kept together as well as it should be kind of dusty and the way that the Adinkra stamps are made is still with calabash, still carved with knives, maybe not even that sharp, and the process of carving the Adinkra for hundreds, maybe a thousand plus years, has not changed. It's still an artist with a sharp tool carving very firmly and sometimes delicately into calabash gourds and then creating these stamps that they then mount on sticks and then they stamp with ink that they've taken days and days to produce and it's made from the same trees that have been providing this ink for hundreds of years and the tree is so cool. It's a tree that when you remove the bark, the bark actually regrows on the tree. They only take enough bark off of one section or one piece to not harm the tree and they then pound the bark into dust and then they double boil the bark with water for days to get this beautiful, almost like a red indigo. It looks black when it's stamped and dried, but when you actually see it up close, it's got this red purple hue to it and you see, it's in a brass pot over a fire. When I met the Adinkra makers, something that I kept asking is, "Well, who decides what happens to the symbols?" and I was asking that because as of now, we know about roughly 100 Adinkra. Some believe that there could be upwards to 400 plus. And so, something that I actually went in search of was, "Where are the rest?" Their point of origin story, one of them, is that they were taken from a tribe that the Ashanti conquered because they wanted the symbols. Not even that they wanted the tribe, they wanted access to the scribes and at the time, scribes who worked with Adinkra lived apart. It is said that they were like their own community of Adinkra makers, thinkers, storytellers and that's what the Ashanti King stole. He took the Adinkra makers and he took the ink and the seeds for the tree and the tools to carve out more stamps. He was like, "You all keep everything else."

Amy Tobey:

So in today's world, it would be more like if Google came in and hired all of my programmers away from me.

Fen Aldrich:

I think that's what you call an acquihire now.

Amy Tobey:

Yeah. Yeah, an acquihire.

Grace Ewura-Esi:

That's exactly what they're called now but it's just making me think about... So it's like, "Well, is the version of the Adinkra today the truth-y version?" Maybe what's missing is, as we say in pockets of the south, "The real real is gone gone. It's just not coming back," and what we have that we think is real is the truth-y.

Shweta Saraf:

Yeah. Listening to what you guys were saying, it makes me feel like the real truth or the truth-y truth, how do you encapsulate that in a way which is easy to understand but also leave it behind for the future generation so that they're not wondering which version of the story I got told and is it really bad if you have multiple versions? Because I mean, that's how the world operates, right? One person's perception might be another person's reality or not.

Grace Ewura-Esi:

I think that this is why for a lot of people who identify as native or Indigenous to any place, the majority of our culture is transmitted not through written things even if they are written somewhere. The record exists... Well, that's not true. Let me back it up. The record might have at one point existed but due to some global intergalactic shenanigans, a lot of us have lost our records, have not seen our records, or our records live in other people's museums and they call it artifacts even though we are alive and well and eyeballing the return of said artifact, right? But with that as a tangent, a lot of what we're talking about is actually, once again, those intangibles. You want to learn the song, you're going to have to come to my house and sing it. And then, next time there's a festival celebrating something fun like a summer equinox or something, you're going to have to come and sing the song and practice in real-time. There's that nature of it where it's in the moment, something is happening, it's not going to be recorded, and you can let loose or be free inside of it in order to participate.

Amy Tobey:

There's even more, especially in pre-colonial music and some persists even today in Southern Pentecostal culture where the music isn't necessarily... There might be a song that people know but it evolves in the performance and becomes something new each time and in those performances, you could try to write it down but you're not going to get what you get each time people get together and perform those songs together. Oftentimes, in my work, we'll join a meeting and somebody will join and they'll say, "Hey, can we record this?" and I often say no and this is important to me because oftentimes, we want to have conversations where the conversation itself is lost to the ether. The reason why is that we can be authentic and be emotional and have hard conversations without it being caught on the record and I think especially, as we get closer and closer and more personal, maybe not having that record is part of what makes it so fulfilling, right? That it's gone. It's let go, it's burned up, and we're not carrying around this baggage of things from the past into the future.

Fen Aldrich:

That's a really interesting. Burned up, I think, in particular is what triggered a thought for myself. There's a lot of ritual, especially that's been built into different cultures, I'm sure, of burning things like getting rid of this and letting go and letting it go and moving on from it and the way to symbolize that is to actually give things over to fire which, as far as we know... It's the closest we can get to absolutely destroying a thing, right? It is forever changed and chemically different than when it was put in. Right? That's a very interesting process of letting go and moving forward and also that concept of not capturing the exact truth of what happened in a moment, not the facts of what can be recorded by camera or what can be observed by a microphone but what is the actual meaningful truth to have come out of that moment, not necessarily what were the words said and how are people feeling right then. I think there's a lot of value in being able to present a new version of ourselves moving forward, right?

Grace Ewura-Esi:

Yeah, Fen. I think that's the bridge and I think that's really what technology's role is here, that is to bring together and to connect, to be honest in what we're doing, and to identify when some of it is imaginative and for us to appreciate some of that for what it is and to realize that the truth doesn't mean that this has to be the only fact. It can just be, like you said, what we're getting out of it in that moment as we receive it and I think that's a really powerful and beautiful thought.

Fen Aldrich:

Me too.

Grace Ewura-Esi:

Growing up in a household that talked about the Adinkra, that respected what they mean because the Adinkra, like I said before, are symbolic pictographic stories. When you see one, they have a lesson to teach us about the natural world or the spiritual world or the psychological world of us. Every tribe has their variation of the stories. Some of us may call them different things even but these symbols, we believe, predate our beginning. They are our beginning. They are eternal. No place in history. They are for everyone and they can teach anyone and I feel like by going to the Adinkra village in Kumasi, I really found that I encountered that in its own living dimension in that space and here I am talking to two of the only three people who carve in the traditional way in a country that has millions of people. The question I asked the lead artist is, "Where are the missing symbols? If one fourth of it can give our people so much understanding, so much connection to each other, where could the rest possibly be?" and when I asked him that he was like, "I don't know. I don't even fully know where they began." He even didn't have the full history of the thing he did but what he did tell me, and that I do strongly believe, is that the Adinkra have an energy to them. He believed that in working with them, they work with you. And so, I asked him what that might mean and he showed me an Adinkra symbol that he had created and he was like, "I couldn't stop thinking about this symbol and I spoke with my father about it and I just knew I had to bring it to life." And so, the symbol he brought forth was a symbol that represented wisdom and the cyclical nature of the cycle of wisdom. He calls it Two Fish and it's the tale of a fish next to the mouth of a fish in both directions and he said that what it represents is how wisdom is about both the young and the more mature sharing understanding in a way in which it never ends. I thought, "Well, one, that's so beautiful and two, I cannot believe people are making new symbols." I really thought that the symbols were locked in time. I didn't know or even think to imagine that they were evolving in real-time with me, with modern Akan, with people who might look upon them and not necessarily be Akan or might not know what their heritage is because that was taken from them and who are connecting with it deeply and it really reminded me of why the Adinkra even exist, right? Here was this person who is doing something in such an ancient way and here was I in search of myself in a very modern way. I had hopped on an airplane, I had a private driver, I had done all these things in such a modern way to learn about this ancient craft hoping to learn more about myself and even though I had went in search of history, I actually found inside of the ancient, the modern.

Amy Tobey:

There's a natural cycle, I think, in what you described, Grace, of we have the new thing, the new thing becomes the old thing, the old thing becomes the ancient thing and traditional thing and it's natural for these things to come and go and pass and evolve. We've been looking at a very narrow slice of the technology timeline when we talk about machine learning and artificial intelligence but, really, this tracks back not even thousands of years just over the last few hundred, the printing press being a pretty impactful technology that changed the way that we preserve and renew and evolve our cultures and I think technology's role, more than anything, has been to speed it up.

Fen Aldrich:

I'm thinking of a similar connection. It really is just about the creative moments. If it works for you, it's useful and I think there's value in how people manifest their intentions and what they want to see in the world and there is value in taking time and putting ritual into, "Hey, I'm going to do a thing that reinforces what I want in the world and drives my attention towards that thing," and I think there's lots of value whether or not we know how it works and if we do know how it works, it doesn't stop being magic. That's what I think is really interesting about all of this and about AI and why I think symbol creation is really important. It allows us to continue to find meaning and derive meaning from our world in ways that we don't scientifically measure but can feel like I feel this symbol has this meaning and now it does because I have assigned that meaning to it and it communicates something I couldn't when I had to quantify this in words. When I had to try and wrap an explanation around it, I couldn't. But then, I made this thing and it evoked the feelings that I wanted and I really like that concept, right? I think it ties into these Adinkra both as they're a thing that is constantly being created and constantly being lost and the meaning that drives and what's important is how it affects us right now, right? Like, what we are going to take from that and what we're going to do with that and how we're going to use that to build the world that we want to see in front of us.

Shweta Saraf:

So, one thing that I did in the first month of when ChatGPT and DALL-E and all these tools were getting released was I wrote a children's storybook which is one of a passion of mine using AI as an experiment and I also created artwork using AI and I did it in less than an hour because I was just having an hour on weekend, I wanted to experiment. But the thing that was beautiful for me was that the characters in this storybook was my child and my dog and I could give them the personality that I wanted and I could create chapters that I wanted them to live or imagine and bring it to life for them. So I mean, whether I'll publish it or not is another question but I was satisfied a lot in terms of exploring that creativity.

Grace Ewura-Esi:

And maybe that's the place where this goes. Maybe as these bridges are built and this content is created, maybe the idea is that it becomes a body of work that sits alongside the ancient and sits a part of the modern that is imaginative. It does what you're saying Shweta like it allows for us to project ourselves into maybe something that we haven't seen before or that we've not necessarily had an opportunity to express and the technology just helps us unveil another layer of ourselves, kind of the journey I was on, right? Looking for myself. Maybe the ancient isn't as far away as we think and maybe it's evolving right next to us, alongside the modern and maybe, just maybe, the work that people are doing with Midjourney is the new tech work that can be done to help us fill gaps that we don't even quite know how to begin to answer. What can technology do for us here and what should technology do for us here when it can get a little wobbly, when it can be the projection of imagination, and when that imagination may not belong to people who might have a shared foundational understanding of maybe what your cultural imagination would be? And how are we, as a collective of people engaging in these new systems and these new ideas, able to responsibly create a future that incorporates the missing pieces of the past?

Grace Ewura-Esi:

Traceroute is a podcast from Equinix and Stories Bureau. This episode was produced by me, Grace Ewura-Esi, with help from John Taylor and Mathr de Leon. It was edited by Joshua Ramsey and mixed by Jeremy Tuttle and Tim Balint, with additional editing and sound design by Mathr de Leon. Our theme song was composed by Ty Gibbons. You can follow us on Twitter at Origins underscore dev — that’s D-E-V. And visit Origins dot dev for even more stories about the human layer of the stack. And if you wanna help even more, a five star rating on Apple and Spotify really does go a long way towards helping other people find the show. I just really wanna say an additional thank you for listening today. This story is deeply personal for me. And has so much of myself wrapped up in it. I would really love to continue the conversation with you on Twitter @GraceEwuraEsi. You can find links and more down in the show notes. Traceroute is back with another story in two weeks. Until then, I’m Grace Ewura-Esi. Thanks for listening.