Why Colin Kaepernick is starting an AI company

WWhen NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial injustice in 2016, he soon found himself unemployed and eventually pivoted to other media and entertainment ventures. Today, he’s breaking into the AI ​​industry by launching a project that he hopes will allow others to bypass “gatekeeping”: an artificial intelligence platform called Lumi.

The new subscription-based platform aims to provide tools for storytellers to create, illustrate, publish and monetize their ideas. The company raised $4 million in funding led by Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, and its product launched today, July 24th.

In an interview with TIME, Kaepernick says that this project can be seen as an extension of his activism. “Most of the world’s stories never come to life. Most people don’t have access to or access to publishers or platforms – or they may have a gap in their skill set that is a barrier to being able to create,” he says. “We will see a whole new world of stories and perspectives.”

Kaepernick says the idea for Lumi grew out of challenges he faced in building his media company, Ra Vision Media, and his publishing company, Kaepernick Publishing, which included “long production lead times, high costs, and creators not having ownership over the work they they create,” he says. When ChatGPT, Dall-E, and other AI models became popular a few years ago, Kaepernick began playing around with the tools, even trying to use them to create a children’s book. (Kaepernick wrote a comic strip, Change the gamebased on your experiences in high school last year.)

Lumi aims to help independent creators create hybrid written and illustrated stories, such as comics, graphic novels and manga. The platform is built “on foundational models,” says Kaepernick — although he declined to say which ones. (Basic models are large, multi-purpose machine learning models like Chat-GPT.) Users interact with a chatbot to create a character, develop their story and characteristics, and construct a narrative. Then, they use an image generation tool to illustrate the character and their journey. “You can go back and forth with your AI companion and test ideas, ‘I want to change the ending’ or ‘I want it to be more comedic or dramatic,’” he says.

Users can then publish and distribute their stories directly on the Lumi platform, order physical copies, and use AI tools to create and sell merchandise based on their intellectual property. Kaepernick hopes the platform will attract aspiring creators with gaps in their skill sets — whether that means athletes who have a story and an audience but no talent for illustrating, or content creators who are having trouble monetizing their work.

“We talked to hundreds of creators and asked them what their pain points were,” he says. “Some were trying to raise funds to launch projects. Others don’t know how to actually enter the space, or they don’t have a path or they have been rejected. And other creators didn’t want to deal with the logistics of fundraising and manufacturing, managing and distributing projects. We hope this creates a path for people to truly thrive with the creativity they are bringing to the world.”

see more information: Colin Kaepernick, 2017 TIME Person of the Year, The Short List

Lumi will give creators full ownership of the works they create on the platform, says Kaepernick. When asked how the company might handle works created in Lumi that allegedly infringe on pre-existing copyrights, Kaepernick responded: “We’re going to develop the fundamental models and we’re going to let the legislators and everyone figure out what the laws and the parameters are going to be.”

Kaepernick is well aware that there is significant distrust and criticism in the creative industries about the rise of AI and its potential to eliminate jobs. Spike Lee, for example, who signed on to direct a next documentary about Kaepernick, said in a February interview that “the danger that AI can cause to cinemas is nothing compared to what it can cause to the world”. Concerns about AI were also at the heart of the Hollywood strikes last year.

“I understand the concerns,” Kaepernick says. “Creators have to be in charge. This is another tool for them to create in a better and more effective way, and it gives them the freedom to create stories they wanted but couldn’t before.” Kaepernick likens these new AI tools to the iPhone’s impact on allowing far more people to experiment with photography. “We saw a whole new world of photography and photos,” he adds. “But that hasn’t eliminated traditional photographers or their art and experience. We see it in a similar way.”

Kaepernick’s team includes engineers who previously worked at Apple (Stefan Dasbach) and Reflex AI (Sam Fazel). A Lumi representative declined to disclose the platform’s monthly price. Creators can start signing up for the beta on July 24th.