When W. Kamau Bell was a child, his mother bought the family a Commodore VIC-20, a popular home computer of the early 1980s. He also had Pong, a ColecoVision and, later, a MiniDisc player. Today, he is still the person his family calls when the TV stops working — and the father who sees technology’s potential to connect his introverted 11-year-old with cousins over FaceTime.
“I am not a technophobe,” Bell said at a recent UC Berkeley Journalism event. “If you say, ‘We’re going there, there’s no Wi-Fi,’ I’m not going there.”
But Bell — a comedian, filmmaker and author known for using humor to examine race and American culture — also said technology’s growing presence does not mean people should unquestioningly hand over their language or creativity to artificial intelligence.
Bell was joined by UC Berkeley Journalism Dean Michael D. Bolden on Aug. 26 for a conversation at the AI, Journalism and Public Trust Symposium, sponsored by UC Berkeley Journalism and the Pulitzer Center. During the discussion, Bell described the subtle ways that AI already shapes everyday communication, like Gmail or Google Docs suggestions that, rather than merely fixing typos, end up standardizing a person’s style. For Bell, whose comedic voice often relies on vernacular and intentionally unconventional grammar, that raises a deeper concern: “You want us all to sound like the same person.”
AI, he said, should not be treated as an inevitable, neutral force. It is a tool, but one being developed and deployed within systems that prioritize corporate profit and centralized power — often at the expense of communities that are already bearing the costs of technological development. He pointed to data centers placed near Black, rural and low-income communities, as well as the danger of automated systems built from historically biased information. “Once you feed in bad information, bad outputs come out of there,” he said.
Rather than trying to halt technological progress altogether, Bell urged people to maintain and invest in forms of connection and creativity that resist automation’s pull. After all, the value of art comes from wrestling with our lived experiences.
“Wasn’t AI supposed to do all the work so we could make art?” Bell said, quoting comedian Stavros Halkias. “Why did we flip it?”
The response to AI cannot rest solely on individual consumer choices or the assurances of technology companies, he said. It requires people to challenge the systems shaping the technology around them.
“I am down for a future of AI that doesn’t exist under American capitalism,” he said.
Watch the conversation, listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).
Photo courtesy of United Shades of America.
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