Jos Duncan-Asé: Who Gets to Tell the Story

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"Are we listening to our grandmothers when we're designing AI tools?"

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Thursday October 29, 2026 · 11:20 AM · Talk

Key ideas from the talk

She opened with a four-minute call-and-response story about a girl who leads children to dig for water in a dry field of dead trees. It ended with "Today we'll call that the Futureproof Festival."
Love Now Media trains community members in Philadelphia to report their own news. Their first assignment was one street question about what would make a community more loving.
They interviewed more than 100 people and used a custom GPT to build a heat map of themes and where love already showed up.
Paid human writers then reported on the issues the heat map surfaced. A second assistant coached new writers to ask better questions.
The coaching framework asks about land and place, lineage, community and the future of the work.
She turned the same four prompts on AI design: where it will be used, what tools came before, who it is designed for, and what it makes possible.
Her screening questions for any AI tool: is it communal, does it answer big universal questions, can it heal, does it unlock imagination, and does it connect generations.

"Everyone thinks an AI policy is a list of rules and regulations that you give your staff about how to use AI. I believe it's an agreement you make with your public and audiences about your use of it and where you're going." Chris, the MC, about Jos's AI policy.
"Those stories give us answers to questions that are big, universal questions."
"What would make your community more loving?"
"Who asks questions like that about news? No one."
"Not every community knows about the history of the land, but most people know about the history of a place. Who made that place a thing?"
"Sometimes I wonder if ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, they're just designing to outpace each other."
"If we don't think about where we are and the ground we're standing on, and who stewards that land and how the land evolves, then we get a dry field of dead trees."