Dr. Fallon Wilson runs technology policy for a national council and calls herself a church girl, and what she wants from pastors using artificial intelligence is not a ban.
“I am a church woman. I’m a church girl,” she said. “I love my church. I love my faith.”
Wilson is vice president of policy at the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council, where she launched Black Churches 4 Broadband, a national campaign to widen digital access in Black communities. She co-founded the BlackTechFutures Research Institute, a network of city-based researchers studying how local Black technology ecosystems survive. She sits on the Federal Communications Commission’s Communications Equity and Diversity Council and chairs its digital inclusion and anchor institution subgroup. Her bachelor’s degree is from Spelman College and her master’s and doctorate are from the University of Chicago.
What she is asking of ministers is narrow. If artificial intelligence goes into the work, she wants the congregation told which part. “If you’re going to use it to synthesize literature about a text, outline how you did it,” she said.
She is harder on the politics than on the pulpit. Churches have organised against data centres going up in their neighbourhoods, and Wilson does not think opposition is where the job ends. “You will deconstruct data centers, but then what do you construct past that?” she asked.
She also named who she trusts to build the tools, and it was not the companies. “These are the people that I trust to build for us,” she said of the researchers and organisers in her own network.
Wilson traces this wave of work to the pandemic, when the gap in home internet access stopped being an abstraction. “That opened the door for all types of digital equity activism and advocacy,” she said.
The church is not the whole picture, and the scholars in the piece say so. Dr. Erika Gault, who directs the Center for the Study of African American Religious Life, has written that “Black people are not contained to the Black Church,” and that “Digital technology, particularly post-COVID, has made room for that diversity, explicitly so.”
