What Did I Actually Make?
What Did I Actually Make? I took one old photograph and built a world around it. I found an old black-and-white photograph online of two people dancing. I don't know who they are. I don't know who took it. I don't know
Lyndon Amoah
Who Gets to Be Dolly After Dolly?
Yesterday, Dolly Parton died, and among all the stories now circulating about the songs, the wigs, Dollywood, the Imagination Library, the sheer scale of the woman, I keep coming back to something much smaller. Two days before she died, in one of her last interviews, she mentioned she'd
We Were Born the Same Year
I am writing this with a Donny Hathaway album playing from a folder I downloaded over Soulseek six years ago. The album is fifty-three years old. The folder lives a few clicks away from recordings I made of my own voice last month, and a few clicks from Amy
Crate Digging Is Archival Work
I was eleven or twelve when I found Donny Hathaway and Billy Paul in my parents' vinyl collection. I did not understand, at the time, that I had stumbled into one of the most powerful traditions in Black music. I just knew the voices were doing something to me.
What Does Responsible AI Actually Look Like? I'm Still Working It Out.
Both of my parents were adopted. Both are Black American, and like so many African Americans, neither knew the full story of where their family came from. The slave trade didn't just separate people from their families. It deliberately severed entire communities from their cultural memory, their languages,
The Tools That Retrieve, The Tools That Generate
Most conversations about AI in the cultural sector treat all AI tools as a single category. They aren't. The most important distinction isn't between good AI and bad AI. It's between tools that work with material that already exists and tools that produce new
Trust Cannot Be Automated
Lately, whenever I see AI mentioned online, the reaction is immediate. Distrust. Fatigue. Irritation. Someone posts a photograph and the comments fill with accusations of fakery. An illustration appears and people recoil before they even know how it was made. A company announces a new AI feature and the response
The Refusal Is The Feature
For weeks I'd been telling people what MNEME does. Ethical AI for cultural heritage organisations. Approved material only. Source grounding in every response. Human review at every stage. The phrases sit well in a deck. The gap between saying it and showing it kept getting larger. So I
Amy Winehouse Called It Blasphemous. Now It's Happening to Her
I found the video by accident. Someone had made an AI-generated Amy Winehouse Tiny Desk concert, the stripped-down NPR format where artists sit in a small office and play like they're performing for friends. No stage. No production. Just the music and whoever's in
You will die with approximately 100,000 unread emails. Nobody has a plan for any of them.
By Lyndon Amoah | MNEME Studios Somewhere, right now, there is a phone that belongs to someone who is no longer alive. It has 4,200 photographs on it. Voice notes. A WhatsApp thread with a sibling that ends mid-sentence. A playlist titled something ordinary, like "morning" or
The Dead Spoke. Nobody Asked If They Should.
By Lyndon Amoah | MNEME Studios On 1 May 2025, a dead man walked into an Arizona courtroom. Not literally. But close enough that the family wept, and the killer sat in silence watching a screen. Christopher Pelkey, shot dead in a road rage incident in Chandler, Arizona in 2021, delivered
Fair-Use of Feelings: How We Design AI That Remembers Us Responsibly
A few nights ago I read an article about AI systems that can detect emotion in a person’s voice; not just the words, but the tremor behind them. It could tell when someone was about to cry, when they were masking irritation with laughter, when silence meant more than