Cyber GRIOT: From Oral Tradition to Digital Reconstruction

Resumen

Given the absence of scriptural documentation in many African societies, the Enlightenment-era conception of history and the domain of oral memory represent distinct, often conflicting epistemological frameworks. While the former relies on verifiable evidence and textual records and often qualifies as ‘facts’, the latter is a subjective realm of personal and communal reconstruction. The intertwining and complementary nature of history and memory makes the question of the truth claim of history more nuanced and complex. The interplay between these epistemological domains underscores the role of memory and forgetting not only in shaping historical narratives but also in exposing the underlying power structure within history and how it shapes certain identities. As Paul Ricoeur observed “it is through the narrative function that memory is incorporated into the formation of identity”, it often becomes challenging to understand the role of dominant narratives and how they control the power dynamics of the ‘undocumented’ past.

The advent of the internet and artificial intelligence further complicates the situation as it has the potential to document certain memories in different digital platforms and make the relationship between history, as a ‘recorded past’ and memory, as an ‘undocumented’ subjective understanding of chronology blurred. D. Fox Harrell, a professor at MIT, builds a computer program for digital storytelling through narrative, poetry, and games, that combines the subjective position of the content creator with AI to create verbal expressions, which goes beyond the conventional understanding of verbal arts. The program is thoughtfully named GRIOT, a reminder of the oral performatory art of telling stories and histories from West Africa. GRIOT can create computational poetry, or “polypoems” or “polymorphic poems”, as it has been termed by Harrell, which is, instead of being an individual creation, AI-generated poetry with “strong socio-cultural grounding” (Harrell) having the potential to change according to different cultural semantics. This program is used for a project, named Living Liberia Fabric, which creates a narrative on the Liberian civil war, by combining the shared and collective memories of people, and their dialogues with the documented past, with the narrative created through the use of AI.

This article seeks to investigate the collaborative nature of AI-human historiography, examining the role of memory within this framework. Specifically, it aims to determine whether memory, as captured and modified in the digital space, serves as an effective medium for preserving history or if it is instead channeled to reinforce specific ideological narratives.