Artificial Intelligence: Ways to Use and Control for Social Impact Purposes
- Imani Wilkins
- Jul 8, 2025
- 2 min read
The Essence Festival just happened on July 3rd- 6th, and it provided time for community and education. The Global Black Economic Forum is a consistent contributor of insights we can use in our community, and this year, they taught many things, including how to find opportunity in AI.
“How do we capture the promise and mitigate the peril?"
The panel on Artificial Intelligence featured prominent impact leaders in tech, health, and education, and shared insights that are vital to consider as AI has gone from an industry insider to being accessible to all.
AI Pros: Because there is currently open access to certain AI tools, there is an opportunity for many groups to learn and leverage the tools to the fullest.
AI Cons: Artificial Intelligence is a machine learning tool that learns from human data. If the data provided is biased or discriminatory, then that machine will adopt the same ideologies and provide biased and discriminatory suggestions and solutions to requests.
“AI can never replace creativity. AI is about logic and boxes, and human nature is about breaking boxes. Creativity is born out of that. Black people are born out of that.”
Why Does This Matter?
If you’re serving marginalized communities while leveraging the benefits of AI, you need to be mindful of how you train AI and how AI is used throughout companies, and the potential biases that have been programmed into it.
Example: ATS Resume Screening System, Lack of Data Highlighting in Healthcare to program AI effectively, etc.
What Do We Need to Get Clear On?
These tools are trained on the data that is available. Conversations around AI are typically generic, but AI is vast. We have to get clearer about the types of AI we are referring to: MLM’s LLMs, etc., and how we want to use them.
Key Takeaways:
Prioritize creating and informing AI tools with correct data regarding our communities so that these tools can serve and assist us appropriately.
Build hyperlocal AI models that consider our unique context.
Decide if we want to create digital twins that fit our unique context, and how we need to maintain control over this data if we share it with these models.
Learn More About the Topic above by Watching the Source Below:
Global Black Economic Forum Summit. (n.d.). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/live/dnEfejC7p5A?si=xN3fAyoBdC5V_0AJ&t=3903
YouTube Segment Timestamp: 1:05-1:28
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