The AI desecration of our ancestors: Stop ‘meme-ing’ dead Black people
The viral “Hotel Lobby” trend is the latest example of using AI to trivialize Black grief
Listen to this story
Last week, Christine Wonsley stood at a podium and tearfully pleaded to find answers for the death of her son, Nolan Wells.
Ever since his death during a Fourth of July trip with his friends in Mississippi, everyone from the NAACP to civil rights attorney Ben Crump and the Mississippi criminal justice system has been seeking answers about the mysterious nature of his passing.
The story has sat at the intersection of race, sports and tragedy.
“The only thing we want to hear, and the only thing we have asked for since day one, is an honest, transparent, fair investigation,” Wonsley said last week, when a Mississippi grand jury declined to charge anyone for her son’s death. Her pain was palpable, whipping across the crowd like a lightning bolt.
A few days later, Wonsley was back on computer screens worldwide. This time, it was a video of her standing next to her late son, rapping over “Hotel Lobby,” Quavo and Takeoff’s 2022 single, with the caption “Nolan helping his Mama Bear Christine solve his case.”
Artificial intelligence slop turned a mourning mother and her deceased teenage son into a meme. It is just another example of how the digital age serves an avenue for the least creative and most soulless among us to disgrace our dead.
In summer 2022, Quavo and Takeoff performed “Hotel Lobby” on “A Colors Show.” The video currently has more than 100 million views. In November 2023, Takeoff was shot and killed at a Houston bowling alley. He was 28. Quavo, his uncle, was on the scene.
Over the past few weeks, people have been using AI scripts to put other duos in place of the former Migos rappers — from former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden to Breaking Bad’s Walter White and Jesse Pinkman to Batman and the Joker. The videos were much like every other version of AI slop that has spread across the internet over the past couple of years.
I came up in the olden days when the internet was at peak creativity. Comedians shone in six seconds, musicians blessed us with Vines that created stars, and visual artists created magic at the tip of their cursors.
On any given night, a random couple’s party outfit would create a night of jokes. An obscure music video about Detroit crime would blow up on YouTube. And people had to create their own skits with cameras and their homies. Now, that creativity has largely been replaced by tossing code into artificial intelligence to manufacture memes that only take up space. And the memes that get promoted and shared are increasingly likely to be bots.
We also know that the use of AI is devastating the environment and Black communities in particular. The NAACP produced a report on the impacts of data centers on air pollution in rural Virginia, noting that 25 percent of the state’s energy consumption comes from these centers.
Boxtown, a majority Black neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee, has reported elevated levels of air pollution since Elon Musk’s data centers were built a few miles away. And this is happening all over the country. Each prompt entered into an AI service can use up to 10 times more energy than a standard Google search.
Yet here we are, expending all that energy not to solve a problem or create something new, but to turn a grieving mother and her dead son into content.
There’s something truly hopeless about using a mechanism that harms Black communities to quite literally erase one Black man, Takeoff, who was murdered, replacing him with images of a grieving Black mother and her deceased Black son without any party’s consent. The act terrorizes our own past, present and future all at once.
To what end? What is this actually contributing to the world? It’s not bringing any sympathy or attention to the Wells case. It does not even pay tribute to Nolan and his family.
I thought about all of this over the weekend while on a history tour through Atlanta’s west side.
The walk started on Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard, named after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s close friend who also co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He put his life on the line to help build democracy in America. We made a left turn onto a street named after Gen. Alexander Lawton, whose most notable accomplishment was failing as the Confederacy’s second quartermaster.
I stood on the corner of Abernathy and Lawton, thinking about all of the monuments that still exist in this country honoring the worst humans to ever walk the country: slave owners and those who killed to maintain what they believed was their right to own and torture. I thought about Emmett Till’s memorial sign that had to be made of steel because it was getting shot at every year on his birthday. I thought about my elementary school, Jefferson Davis Elementary.
I thought about how social media has only given us more avenues to destroy our dead, from the doctored images of Trayvon Martin to make him seem like a “thug,” and the George Floyd memes that unfailingly pop up in a Black person’s mentions whenever we speak up about anything. Even how well-meaning people turned the fight for justice for Breonna Taylor into a dehumanizing meme.
The AI-powered “meme-ing” of our dead is an extension of the way we commodify and minimize deceased Black people.
I understand the desire to keep Black folks alive and the desperate grasp for anything that makes it feel like a fair death is possible. But this ain’t it. We can find other ways. And the more we look, the more we’ll find that the best ways to honor our ancestors involve rejecting a technology that’s stripping away our future.