BlackRhetGurl... as the Source of GenAI Policy?  Yup!

What on earth does my newly trademarked character, BlackRhetGurl, have to do with GenAI? Well, everything!

​
In one of my undergraduate classes in spring of 2025, I tasked students to work in partners and trios and create a profile of a Black public figure's use of Black rhetoric online. Students were asked to use GenAI to craft a visual poster of their rhetorical investigation: digital content with multiple digital processes. It was a kind of two-pronged test: 1) to assess mainstream culture's understanding of Black rhetoric and language when it is so dominant everywhere (i.e., "GenZ language" is actually Black language--- you'll see how and why in this course); 2) to evaluate the ability of GenAI to represent Black bodies and Black visual culture. As I often do, I worked alongside students on the project too. My goal was to create an alter-ego/avatar/comic of a Black Rhetoric Professor who I named BlackRhetGurl.  It was a disaster, especially with GenAI. 

To keep a long story shorter here, I ended up having to chuck the GenAI tools altogether to create BlackRhetGurl because GenAI could not generate anything but overly-sexualized images of Black women, colorism, and just downright visual distortions of Black people's faces and bodies. The students in the class hit the same racial wall. None of this is accidental. 

I would never ban anyone from using any kind of technological tool in my classes, but I do ask that you engage GenAI in very critical ways. OpenAI (the creator of ChatGPT, the prototype for everyone else) has superexploited Kenyan workers as central to the creation of ChatGPT. Kenyan workers had already endured deep trauma from reading and sorting incredibly graphic violent content for Meta and faced wrongful terminations when speaking up and organizing. OpenAI worsened these conditions, all for an average of $1.46-$3.74 per hour as Kenyan workers trained OpenAI’s content-moderation filters. Across the Global South, OpenAI has hired and paid workers less than $2 an hour to moderate its content. The offensive, silly images that folx are producing and the bland writing that everyone is submitting happens on the back of the worst kind of global sweatshops today.

And now here's where BlackRhetGurl comes in. As one example, OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 used the most pornographic images of BIPOC women for its internet scrapings to build their models. So it is not coincidence that when I tried to create a Black woman avatar-- an everyday-fly sistahgurl with a Ph.D. just minding her business, staying hydrated+moisturized, and doing her scholarship on Black rhetoric and life--- GenAI literally could not do it.  It couldn't do anything but recycle racist stereotypes, the very opposite of Black rhetoric, because that is what it was trained to do. It won't be good enough for AI techies to try and make things better now. They done already called me and BlackRhetGurl some Jezebels and harlots... there's just no going forward from there.
​
And the bad news keeps coming. A single “megacampus” (i.e., a data center) uses as much energy in a year as 1.5 -3.5X the energy of San Francisco. GenAI globally-scaled would use more energy than all of India (3rd largest electricity consumer in the world). At its onset, each ChatGPT query required 10X more electricity than a google search. Every single AI-generated image requires the energy of 25% charge of a smartphone.  All that energy for them goofy pictures! Megacampuses now have their sights on more locations in the poorest, rural, and BIPOC communities all over the U.S.A. There's so much more, so if you feel you cannot resist GenAI, you can at least be much more critical about it. If you are someone interested in environmental justice, global equity, or racial justice, trust that GenAI is simply not your ally (and it ain't human anyway).

I want you to also know that I have not used GenAI for help with the course syllabus, on this website, or for any of the images I have created. I have written, drawn, and designed everything myself. I have not used GenAI to generate a single sentence. It's all from my mouth and my heart and my spirit and my funky vibe. I have not and will not use GenAI to grade any of your work, to come up with discussion or writing prompts for us, to do research, or to find sources. The readings and information you get in this class and on on this website come from my time with libraries, bookstores, cultural events, and conversations with elders, community members, and scholars. I'm like old-skool Cheryl Lynn: "it's got to be REAL."

When in doubt, just be mindful of all new technologies. For this class, it's real simple: I want to hear how and what YOU think, even when you aren't sure, when it's messy, and when it doesn't flow yet. I appreciate your style, languages, ideas, and voice more than anything GenAI would ever create. I want you to truly remember and embrace Paul D's words to Sethe in Toni Morrison's Pulitzer prize winning 1987 novel, Beloved: "You your own best thing"!

Thank you for reading and considering!
~Dr. Carmen Kynard, 2026

You your own best thing.

~Toni Morrison, Beloved

Please read below.