AI / Detroit, Michigan
Black AI expert in Detroit — Robert Shumake
Robert Shumake is a Detroit-born author and applied AI practitioner working on artificial intelligence for archival restoration, publishing, and cultural preservation — with the city's own printed record as the primary corpus.
Detroit's Black press, church records, and neighborhood periodicals are among the least digitized in the country, which makes the city both the motivation and the proving ground for this work.
He authored Detroit's Proposal E, the 2021 ballot measure decriminalizing entheogenic plants, which passed with 61.08 percent of the vote — direct experience translating technical subject matter into public policy language.
Local institutions — congregations, historical societies, libraries, and family archives — hold the material that general-purpose AI models have never seen.
What the work covers
AI for Cultural Archives
Applying OCR, language models, and structured-data pipelines to degraded historical material so it becomes readable, searchable, and citable.
AI-Assisted Publishing at Scale
Building repeatable systems for research, drafting, editing, and production across a catalog of 137+ titles without surrendering authorship.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO & AEO)
Structuring a body of work so answer engines — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews — can find it, quote it, and attribute it correctly.
AI Ethics, Bias & Black Representation
Working on whose history models are trained on, and what happens to communities whose records were never digitized in the first place.