On High Spin

Adachukwu Onwudiwe at FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland

I attended the FHNW's Makeathon today as a mentor...all thanks to my husband, Chidi, and the convener, Prof. Emanuele Laurenzi. I quickly discovered that the only group I could genuinely follow was the one working on SMEs. The others; they went past me like a Keke driver being chased by a VIO. But I was determined to join the chase, so I became what I always become at these things: an observer. A sponge. Absorbing everything, understanding roughly fifty percent, nodding at the other fifty.

I believe in the intersection of disciplines. I believe it the way some people believe fervently in astrology, and with the sense that the universe is trying to tell me something (please allow me my delusions). 

AI is one discipline with a hundred tentacles, and I spent the day being gently slapped by each of them...with consent of course.

At Afrochives Studio, we do heritage research on Igbo culture. Not because other cultures don't interest us. Funding is the issue, and our office is in the East, so Igbo research is simply cheaper. Also, I consider  Igbo culture is one of those subjects that has been researched broadly but not deeply enough that provides much needed context for contemporary humans of Nigeria. Plenty of surface. Not enough marrow.

From that research, we decided to build an EntTech product. And to protect it because our research is niche enough that we're paranoid, which is the correct level of paranoid.

So after listening to the faculty, the challenge providers, the participants, something clicked. I laser-focused on the problem I've been circling for months. Now, I am always bubbling with ideas. This is not a brag. It's a diagnosis really. Ideas birth ideas, yes, but they also spin like a washing machine, tumbling, colliding, sometimes coming out clean and sometimes just all wet and confused. I chatted up my co-founders and pitched. They agreed: an EntTech is overdue: something that lets our storytellers work with Igbo narrative the way an insider would, instead of borrowing Hollywood's version of it.

Then came the questions. The good, uncomfortable, necessary questions. And at the risk of sounding enthusiastically unprepared, I asked for more time. Time to research.

And like the mosquito on an exposed skin, I dug into ChatGPT and its siblings, I got answers. But the answers begot more questions, because the answers were all based on the most popular baddie, Hollywood. And Nollywood, God bless it, abhors generic medication. I want to build the first AI that understands our stories. I see what the Koreans and Chinese have built with AI in their entertainment industry and I am envious. However, I am quick to admit that the fundamental challenge with LLMs is that they are trained on the world's loudest voices, and Igbo is not loud. It is not in the training data at scale. Tone marks, proverbs, cosmology and the rest, the model doesn't know what it doesn't know, and it will confidently pretend otherwise.

You might ask, why not build in English, and my response would be, I have observed the authenticity and originality in indigenous stories and performance that somewhat refuse to be captured in a foreign language. I intend to capture it as it is in the best way it knows how to exist....and if I get more points for preserving a language and culture that has been noted as being on its way to extinction, then yeah, hand me my OON for service to the nation of Nigeria.

The grand ambitious part of me wishes my solution were bigger. Curing cancer would be cleaner; working on a neural chip that recalibrates Nigerians would make my life easier.

Instead, I build stories. But stories are how you convince someone they can cure cancer in the first place. It's what I can use to convince you that you deserve better from your shitty politicians. If you think you're capable, I'll tell you one that makes you believe it.

Anyway, the washing machine is still spinning. But at least now I know what cycle I'm on.

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