When NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick started kneeling throughout the nationwide anthem to protest police brutality and racial injustice in 2016, he quickly discovered himself out of a job, finally shifting onto different ventures in media and leisure. Immediately, he’s getting into the AI business by launching a venture he says he hopes will enable others to bypass “gatekeeping:” a man-made intelligence platform known as Lumi.
The brand new subscription-based platform goals to supply instruments for storytellers to create, illustrate, publish and monetize their concepts. The corporate has raised $4 million in funding led by Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, and its product went stay right this moment, July 24.
In an interview with TIME, Kaepernick says this venture could be considered as an extension of his activism. “The vast majority of the world’s tales by no means come to life. Most individuals don’t have entry or inroads to publishers or platforms—or they might have a niche of their skillset that’s a barrier for them to have the ability to create,” he says. “We’re going to see a complete new world of tales and views.”
Kaepernick says that the concept for Lumi got here out of challenges he confronted whereas constructing his media firm, Ra Imaginative and prescient Media, and his publishing firm, Kaepernick Publishing, which included “lengthy manufacturing timelines, excessive prices, and creators not having possession over the work they create,” he says. When ChatGPT, Dall-E, and different AI fashions broke by way of to the mainstream a pair years in the past, Kaepernick began taking part in with the instruments, even making an attempt to make use of them to create a kids’s guide. (Kaepernick penned a graphic novel, Change the Sport, based mostly on his highschool experiences, final yr.)
Lumi goals to assist unbiased creators forge hybrid written-illustrated tales, like comics, graphic novels, and manga. The platform is constructed “on high of foundational fashions,” Kaepernick says—though he declined to say which of them. (Foundational fashions are giant, multi-purpose machine studying fashions like Chat-GPT.) Customers work together with a chatbot to create a personality, flesh out their backstory and traits, and construct a story. Then they use an image-generation software for instance the character and their journey. “You may travel along with your AI companion and check concepts, ‘I need to change the ending,’ or ‘I need it to be extra comedic or dramatic,’” he says.
The customers can then publish and distribute their tales proper on the Lumi platform, order bodily copies, and use AI instruments to create and promote merchandise based mostly on their IP. Kaepernick hopes that the platform will attraction to aspiring creators with gaps of their talent units—whether or not which means athletes who’ve a narrative and an viewers however lack illustrating chops, or content material creators who’re having hassle monetizing their work.
“We talked to a whole lot of creators and requested what their ache factors had been,” he says. “Some had been making an attempt to fundraise cash to get initiatives off the bottom. Others do not know how one can really enter the area, or do not have a pathway or have been rejected. And different creators didn’t need to deal with the logistics of fundraising and manufacturing and venture administration and distribution. We hope that this creates a path for individuals to truly thrive off of the creativity that they are bringing to the world.”
Learn Extra: Colin Kaepernick, TIME Particular person of the 12 months 2017, The Brief Record
Lumi will give creators full possession of the works they create on the platform, Kaepernick says. When requested about how the corporate would possibly cope with works which might be created on Lumi however are alleged to have infringed on pre-existing copyrights, Kaepernick responded: “We’ll construct on the foundational fashions, and we’ll let the legislators and all people work out what the legal guidelines and parameters are going to be.”
Kaepernick is effectively conscious that there’s vital distrust and criticisms inside artistic industries concerning the rise of AI and its potential to remove jobs. Spike Lee, as an example, who signed on to direct an upcoming documentary about Kaepernick, stated in a February interview that “the hazard that AI may do to cinemas is nothing in comparison with what it may do to the world.” Issues about AI had been additionally on the heart of the Hollywood strikes final yr.
“I perceive the issues,” Kaepernick says. “The creators should be within the driver’s seat. That is one other software for them to have the ability to hopefully create in a greater, simpler approach, and that offers them freedom to create tales that they needed to however couldn’t earlier than.” Kaepernick compares these new AI instruments to the iPhone’s affect on permitting a a lot bigger swath of individuals to experiment with images. “We noticed a complete new world of images and pictures,” he provides. “However that did not remove conventional photographers or their craft and experience. We take a look at this in an analogous approach.”
Kaepernick’s crew contains engineers previously at Apple (Stefan Dasbach) and Reflex AI (Sam Fazel). A consultant for Lumi declined to reveal the month-to-month worth of the platform. Creators can start signing up for the beta model on July 24.