W. Kamau Bell on AI at Berkeley: a tool, not an inevitability

W. Kamau Bell spent an evening at UC Berkeley arguing that artificial intelligence is a tool worth using and a force worth refusing to treat as inevitable. The recording and transcript of the Aug. 26 conversation went up on the university's site this week.

The talk closed the AI, Journalism and Public Trust Symposium, co-hosted by UC Berkeley Journalism and the Pulitzer Center at the Logan Multimedia Center in North Gate Hall. Journalism dean Michael Bolden introduced Bell and led the conversation. It was the school's first major event of the academic year, Bolden said.

Bell, who grew up with a Commodore VIC-20 his mother bought the family and is still the person his household calls when the television stops working, opened by clearing away the obvious objection. "I am not a technophobe," he said. "If you say, 'We're going there, there's no Wi-Fi,' I'm not going there."

His concern was narrower and closer to home: the suggestions that arrive uninvited in Gmail and Google Docs, which he said go past fixing typos and start smoothing out how a person writes. Bell's comic voice leans on vernacular and on grammar he breaks on purpose. Run-on sentences, he said, are one of his trademarks. Accept enough corrections and the email he sends starts to sound like the email he gets back.

"You want us all to sound like the same person," he said.

From there he moved to who is building the technology. AI is being developed and deployed inside systems that reward corporate profit and concentrated power, he said, and the costs land first on communities that have already absorbed the costs of earlier technology. He pointed to data centers sited near Black, rural and low-income communities, and to automated systems trained on historically biased records. "Once you feed in bad information, bad outputs come out of there," he said.

He was not calling for a halt. Bell said the useful response is to keep investing in the kinds of connection and creativity that automation cannot absorb, because the value of art comes out of working through lived experience. Quoting the comedian Stavros Halkias, he asked: "Wasn't AI supposed to do all the work so we could make art? Why did we flip it?"

And he said the answer does not sit with individual consumers deciding which app to open, or with technology companies promising to behave. It requires people to challenge the systems the technology is being built inside.

"I am down for a future of AI that doesn't exist under American capitalism," he said.

Bell told the room he used to live in downtown Berkeley and would walk to North Gate Hall to record in the journalism school's basement studio. The full conversation is posted with a transcript on the university's site.