The Charlotta Bass Journalism and Justice Lab, in collaboration with the USC Digital Repository, Amava’s Bazaar and Casual Astronaut unveiled an interactive AI screen for students to learn more from Black voices on February 11.
The screen is part of the Second Draft Project, an initiative by the Bass Lab founded by Dr. Allissa Richardson.
“Journalism is the first draft of history,” Richardson said. “In the context of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, I kept thinking about how his first draft was that horrible video that kept going over and over again.”
Richardson felt that Floyd needed a “second draft” that focused on him as a person, rather than just his final moments. She founded the Bass Lab in 2022 with their first initiative being the Second Draft Project. The project’s mission is to give voice back to Floyd’s family, as well as others who have been affected by insensitive coverage of police violence, with the ultimate goal of creating an exhibit around their experiences.
The AI-generated screen is located on the second floor of Wallis Annenberg Hall, where students can ask activists questions about their experiences with racial injustice and receive pre-recorded responses.
The digital repository takes the viewer through history as students can learn about events through the eyes of the people it affected. This year’s edition features civil rights attorney Lee Merritt and Philonise Floyd, the younger brother of George Floyd. Last year’s installation featured Ilyasah Shabazz, daughter of civil rights activist Malcolm X.
The project debuted in 2023 with Rodney King’s daughter, Lora King. She is one of the activists on the screen that viewers can interact with through AI technology. When an Annenberg Media reporter asked what happened to her father, the digital figure of King articulated the racial injustice that happened on March 3, 1991.
“My father’s beating wasn’t the first. This was normal behavior, so he knew it was a possibility when he got pulled over that he would be beaten,” she said.
King was severely beaten by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department during his arrest after a high-speed pursuit for driving while intoxicated on the I-210.
The questions asked to King, Shabaz, Merritt and Floyd were written by students in Richardson’s Second Draft Project class. Students prepared over 500 questions per person, totaling over 2,000 questions for the project in its entirety.
Mike Jones, the director of web and automation technologies at USC Libraries, worked on the production of the interviews from start to finish. He described the process of sorting through 200 to 500 individual answers from each interview.
“We transcribe them automatically with AI, and then we have our team review them to make sure that they’re accurate, especially with names and entities,” he said. “We then use that data to train a chatbot. It matches the question to the original question and replies back with what the best response is. That triggers the video to play.”
The Charlotta Bass Journalism and Justice Lab shares stories and oral histories of Black social justice leaders in California. The lab’s mission is to honor Bass, a pioneering Black woman activist and editor-publisher of the California Eagle newspaper and connect USC Annenberg students to other news organizations that feature Black storytelling.
The reveal the Second Draft Project’s interviewee of the year coincides with Charlotta Bass Day, a city holiday spearheaded by the Bass Lab and Richardson herself. Every year, the Bass Lab’s staffers and student workers plan the Charlotta Bass day celebration at Annenberg.
Angaelos Hanna, a master’s student studying transportation engineering, said the digital repository was eye-catching.
“It’s a very attractive visual,” she said. “It looks like somebody’s actually sitting right there on the other side of the screen, ready to have a conversation with you. It looks like you go through several eras of history.”
Adam Young, a junior studying journalism, said the screen was a helpful tool to highlight Black History Month, which occurs every February. However, he said the AI-generated figures made him uneasy.
“I think it’s really cool, highlighting Black history, but I think the display is kind of creepy too because she’s just sitting there blinking, and I have no clue how that works,” he said. Young also mentioned that he hoped not to see more installations like this.
Hanna countered his point of view and mentioned she would like to see more installations like this. She said, “This would be a great way to tell a story, rather than people just reading kind of a blurb on the wall they get to hear from maybe a person in history.”
Jones hopes for a bright future for these interactive interviews to be at USC.
“What we’re really trying to see is, how can we make this more accessible…and then other ways of incorporating this, like embedding it in the classroom or in educational materials,” he said.
The interactive AI screen will be available on the second floor of Wallis Annenberg Hall for the rest of the spring semester. Students wanting to participate in the creation of next year’s edition of the Second Draft Project can enroll in Richardson’s Second Draft Project class in the fall.
Correction: This story has been updated to include an interview with the Bass Lab. A previous version incorrectly stated that the USC Digital Repository unveiled the project, when it was actually the Bass Lab. Additionally, the story previously stated that the project debuted last year with Lora King; it actually debuted in 2023 with Lora King.