Now they use artificial intelligence to reconstruct stories that no one recorded

In short, The fuel of AI is data. Computing power organizes and analyzes millions of data in record time (seconds) and with it predicts the future. At the risk of oversimplifying it, one could say that a system is capable of writing text or creating an image because it is based on texts and images already created. Predict what that could be and do it.

Now, several organizations, companies, universities and a museum have come together to predict what has already happened. It is like going back to the past, but one of which there is no recorded record. There is no text, no image, nothing. Only the oral transmission of its protagonists with their children, grandchildren, neighbors. Maybe some object will appear in those huge databases. A vase, a table, a bus ticket. No more.

The oral history will now be converted into thousands of data and then sorted. The idea is that later, that story can be seen as if someone had actually recorded it.

The organization Griot and Grits is collecting memoirs of African Americans in the United States, creating an archive of oral histories and videos that might otherwise be lost or at least begin to become diluted.

From their name the intention is clear: Griot were the elders who in Africa had the duty of transmitting their culture to other generations. And Grits is a food dish from the southern United States based on grits. Maybe there is something in the ingredients of the fusions. Something that school manuals do not tell but that Now thousands of data can reveal.

Griot and Grits teamed up with historians, technologists and Red Hat, the emblematic open source tech company, which will organize your data using AI. It also added Shaw University in North Carolina (always closely related to the African-American community) and Mass Open Cloud, a low-cost research cloud, the result of collaboration between academics, research centers, the government and industry.

The goal is to create a Comprehensive, searchable digital library of oral and video stories engravings about the lives of African Americans. Also highlight key events from recorded content that can be associated with similar moments to create a richer story.

For example, “until the early 1960s, African Americans were not allowed to ride the bus in the United States. This is all so recent, but it is being lost. The idea is preserve what they lived so that it is not lost. Preserve and also use AI so that their descendants or whoever wants can interact. Another example, you have an old pot, and it is there and there is no connection between the people speaking and that pot. But with AI, history is going to speak to us. There is going to be an interaction with the database and history, something we have never seen,” enthuses Alexandra Machado, director of Red Hat’s Social Innovation Program, who visited Buenos Aires.

Furthermore, the idea is to generate a geographical representation of stories to allow people to also search by location.

The second step is going to be a video. But finding the gaps and including them. All in all, the mission is to recreate a documentary-like view of individual stories to complement key events with background information, photographs and videos.

Once the content is in the repository, the open source AI models They will enrich the data and fill in the gaps with information, videos, audio and images from public domains of museums and libraries. Working together with these public entities provides the project with access to important history archives, which will also be used to train the generative AI models.

These open source models will be used to create rich content such as videos, images, summaries of key events, and AI narrators that will make family stories more engaging. The result will be a searchable table of contents, based on metadata and key events, that will allow users to explore history through a search engine or a visual geographic map.

“When I was studying, the computing power was not enough to run a simple AI program. AI apps are very complex. I remember when I did my master’s degree at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (N of R: a little over 15 years ago) I set out to classify music. The program had to say, for example, this is country music, this is rock… to achieve that I had to leave the program running all weekend. Well, Now with the computing power we have, that can be done in a minute.. We have the processing power to process that. And when AI intersects with quantum computing, we are really going to be on another level,” explains Machado.

The Griot and Grits project will be available in one of the most important museums in Washington (the name cannot be revealed yet for legal reasons), but the interesting thing is that it will not be necessary to travel there to get closer to these untold stories. The idea is that everything is published on the Internet.

Since open source is behind the move, everyone can contribute their testimonies to an Internet address that is already receiving information.

“I estimate that at the beginning of 2026 we will have something concrete, because we already have the solution. But perhaps the most outstanding thing about all this is that it can then be taken to other communities and other museums. This is the advantage of open source. Once you have developed a solution, you can move it to another cloud and use it adapting it to your needs, but you are no longer starting from scratch. It would be wonderful if the idea caught on in Argentina and could be replicated in the history of local communities,” Machado concludes.