‘They're Not Asking For A Seat At The Table. They're Rebuilding It Entirely' – Meet The Black Women Rewriting The Future Of AI

Elle

4 days ago

Artificial Intelligence is reshaping the fabric of society whether we like it or not. It goes beyond the friendly tone given to the Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) that we use when planning a trip, or even the type of text message to send to that emotionally unavailable guy who just won't act right.
AI is in fact informing decisions about who gets access to healthcare, employment, housing, and ever importantly, freedom. Yet, as the field expands (albeit in an unregulated and exponential rate), so does the urgent need to interrogate who is building these systems and whose values are embedded in the algorithms. In a landscape historically dominated by white and male perspectives, Black women have emerged as critical voices pushing for equity, transparency, and justice in AI. Their presence is not simply symbolic; it is transformative and necessary.
Black women in AI are not only contributing technical expertise but also grounding the work in lived experience, historical analysis, and a politics of care that is often missing from the mainstream tech industry. Due to centuries of Anti-blackness coupled with sexism, Black women continue to be at the mercy of oversights in various fields, which can prove detrimental and sometimes fatal. Healthcare is a glaring example of this; in the UK Black women are almost three times more likely to die during or within six weeks of pregnancy compared to white women. The interventions of Black women in AI force us to confront the uncomfortable truth: AI is not neutral. Behind every dataset is a legacy of power, exclusion, and bias.
Perhaps no one exemplifies this better throughout my research, than Joy Buolamwini, founder of the Algorithmic Justice League. Her MIT Media Lab research revealed how commercial facial recognition systems failed to accurately detect darker-skinned faces (particularly Black women) forcing major tech companies to reckon with the ethical failures of their software. Buolamwini didn't just diagnose a problem; she sparked a global reckoning. A question that I keep asking is 'how do these companies keep getting it wrong over and over again?' When does the lack of inclusivity in AI stop being a silly faux pas and instead seen as a strategised attempt at erasure.
As someone who has built their platform on saying their mind, I am always enamoured by other women speaking up courageously in their field of expertise. That is how I cam across Dr. Timnit Gebru, co-founder of Black in AI, who has fearlessly taken on Big Tech. After being ousted from Google for raising concerns about the risks of large language models, she founded the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) —an independent organisation centering community-rooted, anti-colonial AI research. Why this is important to me personally is because I am regularly chastised by trolls online for 'making everything about race.' What Gebru's work confirmed to me is that without the influence of Black women in tech, more impenetrable racist systems would be built, which could take decades to rectify. Her fearlessness not only exposed systemic racism in Silicon Valley but also offered a blueprint for doing tech differently.
Other trailblazers like Mutale Nkonde, founder of AI For the People, and Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression, are using policy, media, and academia to reveal how AI reinforces existing power structures, and doesn't modernise them. Whether through legislation, books, or public education, they are ensuring that conversations about AI include, and centre Black voices, especially those of Black women.
Crucially, these women are not asking for a seat at the table. They are rebuilding the table entirely. In other words, they didn't wait to be invited to do the meaningful work, they got to work regardless. They should be our reminder that the future is not preordained by machines and coded binaries; it's designed by people. And when Black women are included in the creation of that design, the result is not just smarter tech, but fairer, more human systems.
I am inspired by these women, not just for what they do, but for how they do it: with integrity, radical imagination, and refusal to be co-opted by the very systems they critique. It is not always easy to raise one's head above the parapet for fear of being seen as an Angry Black Woman. This same spirit fuels my own work, albeit from a different angle. As a writer and cultural commentator, I've chosen to explore similar questions through the lens of science fiction.
In my upcoming novel, Awakened, we follow a young Black woman in London who discovers ancient, dormant powers within herself just as Black children begin mysteriously dying, their bodies found by rivers and lakes. A journalist by profession, she begins investigating these tragedies, only to uncover a supernatural conspiracy entangled with real-world systems of neglect and violence.
Writing speculative fiction allows me to interrogate reality by bending it. Like one of my favourite authors, Octavia Butler, I'm using genre to ask questions that mainstream narratives often sideline. What does liberation look like in a world that wasn't built with us in mind? How do we reclaim our spiritual and ancestral knowledge in an age of algorithmic erasure? And can we, as Black women, wholly embody the identity of architects of not just resistance—but re-imagination?
The parallels between speculative fiction and AI are striking, because both involve world-building. Both carry the power to shape perceptions, define truths, and govern futures. But unlike the opaque algorithms written for the benefit of corporate boardrooms, fiction can make the invisible visible. It can expose the hidden logics that underlie our systems and reframe what's possible—especially when told through the eyes of those most often written out of the future.
Black women in AI are shifting the culture from within. I'm doing it through story. We are not anomalies; we are archetypes of a new era. And we are not asking permission. There is an ancient blueprint and it's about time that we remember our place and power within it.
Awakened by Kelechi Okafor is out now (Trapeze, £18.99).
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