AI / Michigan
Black AI expert in Michigan — Robert Shumake
Statewide, Robert Shumake works on AI-assisted restoration of Michigan's printed record — newspapers, congregational archives, and community publications that predate digitization.
Michigan's industrial and migration history is heavily documented on paper and microfilm, and only lightly represented in the datasets modern models are trained on.
Restoration work is structured so the output is publicly retrievable rather than locked inside a private collection.
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.