USC Bass Lab x USC Libraries Present “Interactive Interviews” at EDUCAUSE 2023

By Myah Genung

The USC Bass Lab’s Dr. Allissa V. Richardson, along with Craig Stubing and Linda Truong of the USC Digital Repository, presented at the annual EDUCAUSE conference this past October in Chicago. The presentation – “Using AI-Driven Interviews to Bring Important Stories and Experiences to Life” – highlighted The Second Draft Project; our now two-year collaboration with the USC Digital Repository, which uses cutting-edge technology to capture and preserve vital testimonies of African Americans who have close ties to social justice movements. 

The Second Draft Project’s inaugural interview of Lora King, who is the daughter of Rodney King and founder of his namesake foundation, was presented as a case study to the audience of about 50 educators from across the country. The Digital Repository detailed the process by which the website can “listen” to users’ questions of an interviewee and the backend machine learning software then interprets that question and searches for the most relevant pre-recorded answer and plays it back to the user. The resulting experience feels like a face-to-face conversation.

Dr. Richardson then spoke about the use of AI in this project as an ethical and powerful aid to empathy and understanding. The groundbreaking text-to-speech and playback technology invites users to participate in the storytelling process by using questions and prompts to draw out a subject’s testimony. This allows audiences to commune with important figures of America’s social change movements such as author, activist and daughter of Malcolm X Ilyasah Shabazz, who will provide the second oral history in The Second Draft Project to be premiered in Spring 2024. Dr. Richardson’s concluding message to the conference was that it is our hope that, when used for good, AI can help create content that fosters a deeper understanding of the human experience.