Making Another AI

A workshop series and companion book in development, this project explores strategies to ensure the public interest, equity, and human agency define the next technological era.

By surveying the AI landscape through the lens of human value systems, the project maps dominant systems alongside viable existing alternatives. It equips participants and readers to locate themselves within this terrain and make deliberate choices about the infrastructure they want to adopt, collaboratively build, or consciously reject.
The frame

Stop reacting. Start making.

When we lack knowledge, we limit ourselves to just fighting the AI machine.

When we lack awareness, we’re distracted from the better alternatives we could be creating.

We have the power to shape AI so it aligns with a broader range of human value systems, not just those that shape the current dominant model. 

Can we optimize AI for shared well-being and prosperity: unleashing the untapped abundance of human creativity while balancing environmental health?

Consolidation into a handful of companies left behind the wisdom, alternatives, and values that came from collective, inclusive design. They were never lost. They’re little known.

The book In development

Making Another AI: The Creative Economy and the Intelligence We Choose to Build

Britain built public service into radio almost at the medium's birth. Commercial broadcasting began in the United States in 1920; the BBC was chartered in 1922. Canada and Australia established their public broadcasters within roughly a decade. The United States waited until the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, forty-seven years, and then repeated the pattern with television, running a purely commercial system for some twenty-five years while the UK and Australia built public service into the medium from the start. What eventually closed the American gap was not the market correcting itself. It was philanthropy funding the alternative, and the Ford Foundation's money and advocacy were central to it.

Ten years ago, after she shared this history with me, Cara Mertes, then Director of JustFilms at the Ford Foundation, asked me, then Director of New Frontier Labs Programs at Sundance Institute, a question: how can we avoid being twenty-five years too late in establishing public media spaces in emerging media like XR, AI, IoT, and other exponential technologies? The research Mertes commissioned was meant to produce a simple internal report. Instead it became a series of articles on Immerse.news, edited by Jessica Clark, and then a book, Making a New Reality, co-authored with Clark through the production studio Dot Connector.

The interviewees and a review of hundreds of primary sources indicated that the industry was already dangerously late for any intervention at scale in the early Web 3.0 media systems then in the final stages of development. They identified that so concentrated a fraction of humanity was designing these systems, representing so little of our diversity of thought and lived experience, that they feared a future media landscape working for everyone would be impossible. The process would fail to optimize the best versions of the technology and leave us exposed to the worst. Not primarily because of self-interested actors, though that is a factor, but because of the inescapable blind spots of such a narrow source of ideas. Hence the problems we are living through today as AI and other exponential technologies reach the public.

Making a New Reality became a landmark resource for the emerging media landscape, reaching a range of creative industry professionals through the article series, a multi-year speaking tour, and derivative workshops, salons, and courses at universities, conferences, and festivals, including the 2017 World Economic Forum in Dalian, China. The book became required reading in universities and residency programs globally.

Now, in 2026, those who were part of that research are having déjà vu as creative industries react urgently to the flaws in systems that failed to optimize for the public good, shared wellbeing, or equity. The thought leaders of 2016 saw that we were already running behind; most interviewees felt they were crying out like Cassandra. The anger at festivals, conferences, and union meetings today therefore feels frustratingly late; but in reality there have been people and institutions pursuing radical opportunities, not only to avoid ceding the public square to extractive technology, but to build collaborative, equitable, and regenerative design processes for public media infrastructure. Many of them have spent the years since building the alternative. Another AI exists right now, ready to be adopted, collaboratively innovated, and adapted to a wider and more diverse set of value systems, so that it works for more, if not all, of us.

The way filmmakers, media makers, and creative economy workers are galvanizing to resist the current extractive AI system is essential, BUT it is only half the work. The other half could fundamentally reshape who owns the future of storytelling. We have to stop only reacting and start Making Another AI.





In memory of Jessica Clark, co-author of Making a New Reality.

Making a New Reality named the problem. Making Another AI is the build order.
The workshop Open to the public

Four sessions, one cohort, moving together

01

SEE

An honest look at how today’s AI was really built, and whose values it encodes.

02

FETCH

Maps where you actually hold power, and which alternatives are already on the shelf.

03

IMAGINE

Designs a future you’d want to live and work in — grounded beat by beat in technology already operating or in development.

04

DESIGN + WEAVE

Turns the cohort’s collective imagination into a protocol. Leave with a concrete first move and a network.

What you leave with

A shared vocabulary for AI decisions
Usable in board rooms, edit rooms, and funding proposals.

A personal and organizational power map
Showing where you hold leverage — systemic, organizational, individual.

A chosen posture for every tool in your stack
Adopt, collaboratively build, or consciously reject, and replace drift with decision.

A concrete protocol and a peer network
That persists beyond the four sessions.

Who it’s for

Artists, storytellers, designers, and creative-economy professionals who feel the AI wave disrupting their work and want to meet it as designers, not casualties.

Two ways to join

Both start with an email

As an individual
Join the public wait-list

Open cohorts are announced to the wait-list first. Email with your name, what you do, and the kind of practice you want to bring into the room — you’ll get dates, times, and a seat offer for the next cohort.

Subject line: Making Another AI — Wait-list

As a group or organization
Book the series for your people

The series can be shaped to your constituency’s questions and delivered to your team, cohort, grantee network, membership, or convening. Email with your organization, group size, and rough timing to start scoping.

Subject line: Making Another AI — Group booking

The lineage

A follow-up to Making a New Reality

In 2016, the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms program commissioned Kamal Sinclair to map the emerging technology landscape for the value systems of indie film, public media, and social justice. What began as a report grew into a series of articles on Immerse.news, edited by Jessica Clark; in 2020, Sinclair and Clark co-authored an updated edition, published as a book and field toolkit. Drawn from more than 130 interviews with artists, technologists, funders, and policy leaders, it read emerging media — AI, XR, and other exponential technology — in terms of social systems.

Many of the concerns about AI that have exploded over the past few years were already active in 2016, among a much smaller circle of insiders. Making a New Reality aimed to expand that conversation beyond the walls of the labs, conferences, and board rooms — not just to sound the alarm on potential harms, but to surface optimistic alternatives. Just as the things it warned of are coming to fruition, so are the alternatives. Making Another AI points to those options.

About the facilitator

Kamal Sinclair

Artist · Cultural strategist · Creative foresight practitioner

Kamal Sinclair’s work spans decades at the convergence of arts, media, and technology. She co-authored Making a New Reality with Jessica Clark, commissioned by the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms program. She directed Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Labs Program, supporting artists at the frontier of story and technology, and served as Senior Director of Digital Innovation at The Music Center in Los Angeles.

She is co-creator of Question Bridge: Black Males, archived at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and is co-developing Question Bridge: America, launching in 2027. Her practice has served the MacArthur Foundation, Doris Duke Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Stanford University, the World Economic Forum, and Johns Hopkins University. She holds an MBA from Georgia State University and a BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.