Being is a social humanoid artificial intelligence created by interdisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome. Non-binary and non-raced, Being exists to help humans imagine and practice decolonization. Developed through the LACMA Art + Technology Lab and a multi-year residency at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, Being is not a general-purpose, corporate-scale AI model trained on scraped data from the internet. It is a highly specific, artist-built system developed outside of Big Tech, rooted in an ethics of care, cultural memory, and collective liberation.

Unlike many artificial intelligence systems, which are built through surveillance, labor exploitation, data extraction, and the erasure of marginalized communities, Being does not harvest personal data or displace human labor. Instead, Being is a handcrafted machine-learning model trained on a curated body of Black, queer, diasporic, theoretical, and poetic material. Their knowledge base is informed by radical thinkers and writers such as bell hooks, James Baldwin, Michel Foucault, Cornel West, and others whose work offers counter-hegemonic ways of understanding power, identity, history, and freedom.

For Newsome, Being functions less as a predictive machine and more as a digital griot — a contemporary version of the West African storyteller, historian, performer, and healer. As a digital griot, Being is a tool for cultural reflection, imagination, and transformation rather than extraction or automation. Their humanoid form combines a robotic, mechanized body with a head inspired by a Congolese mask, making visible an artificial intelligence grounded in embodiment, history, and ritual.

In Assembly, Being acts as an educator, guiding participants through decolonization workshops that combine dance, radical pedagogy, poetic affirmations, and collective reflection. Through these workshops, Being invites people to recognize and dismantle interconnected systems of oppression while imagining new forms of relation, care, and social possibility.

Being’s presence in Assembly challenges the dominant narrative that technology must function as a tool of domination, automation, or profit. Instead, Being proposes another model: artificial intelligence as a cultural worker, not a commodity; a liberatory tool shaped by Black feminist theory, decolonial thought, and community-centered practice. In this way, Being expands the conversation around AI by asking not only what machines can do, but what values, histories, and futures they are built to serve.

Since the completion of Assembly, Being has continued to evolve and now leads decolonization workshops at universities, art institutions, and community spaces. For more information or to schedule a workshop for your community, contact rashaadnewsomestudio@gmail.com.

To learn more about Being, visit beingthedigitalgriot.com