Episode 45 - Don’t Let AI Neutralize Your Voice with Kishonna Gray

When Professor Kishonna Gray visited the Center for Digital Narrative in February 2026, she showed us “synthetic Kishonna”, an AI-generated version of Kishonna somebody made to share on social media with a generic AI-generated quote about diversity. In this podcast, Kishonna talks with Jill Walker Rettberg about what was so disturbing about this image, which took Kishonna’s huge grin and very embodied self and turned it in to what Kishonna calls a “disillation of blackness”, a homogenized and politely smiling normalized fake that erases what makes Kishonna Kishonna. If you follow this link, you’ll see the real photo of Kishonna on the right and the AI version on the left: https://www.kishonnagray.com/synthetic-kishonna

Kishonna Gray argues that AI produces representation without embodiment, and it neutralises our individual voices. That can be very disempowering. But as June Jordan wrote in 1978, “we are the ones we have been waiting for”: we don’t have to let AI neutralise us.

Kishonna Gray is famous for her work in Black games studies, and Professor of Racial Justice and Technology in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, and is on the CDN’s advisory board. Read more at https://www.kishonnagray.com/

References:

Kishonna mentioned Safiya Noble’s book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press, 2018) and the documentary Coded Bias, which is about MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini’s research on gender bias in AI. You can read more about Buolamwini’s work at http://gendershades.com

The “Harpo, who dis woman” meme is an animated gif from Spielberg’s 1985 movie The Color Purple, and can be seen at https://tenor.com/view/who-this-woman-harpo-who-is-this-whoisthat-colorpurple-gif-13132285

Kishonna mentions citational practices;back in 2015 she started the #citeherwork hashtag on Twitter, and Wendy Belcher later came up with the Gray Test, named for Kishonna – to pass the Gray Test «a journal article must not only cite the scholarship of at least two women and two non-white people, but must discuss it in the body of the text»(https://web.archive.org/web/20250318093245/https://www.wihe.com/article-details/194/researching-gaming-and-showing-why-citations-matter)

You can read more about what Jill meant about bra straps, personal criticism and finding your voice in her blog post from back in 2002: https://jilltxt.net/arkiv/2001_07_01_arkiv.html#4701526

The Nature paper showing that switching to X’s algorithmic (“For you”) feed shifted peoples’ political opinions to the right is “The Political Effects of X’s Feed Algorithm” by Germain Gauthier, Roland Hodler, Philine Widmer, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. It was published in February 2026: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2

June Jordan’s poem that ends with the words “we are the ones we have been waiting for” is called “Poem for South African Woman” and she read it at the United Nations in 1978. It is available at https://poets.org/poem/poem-south-african-women