Better AI, Built for Us: Inside AiSHA - An AI Centered Around Black People

Ever wonder why artificial intelligence tends to carry some of the same biases we see in real life? That’s because it reflects the perspectives of those who created it.

Onyx Impact, under Esosa Osa’s leadership, launched Aisha (pronounced Eye–ee-shah), an artificial intelligence chat assistant built for Black communities on June 25th, 2026. Osa created Aisha because AI doesn’t reflect Black people's views, values, or perspectives. 

For example, Osa points out that ChatGPT recommended the death penalty more often when defendants "sounded Black." Although “sounding Black” is ambiguous, it has been documented by many Black psychologists that people of African descent have unique ways of speaking the language of whomever enslaved or colonized us. Those other AI platrorms are likely picking up on those cues that retain sentence structure and other elements of African languages in this “sounding Black”. 

Ai Is Not Neutral

Companies purport AI as objective. Osa's counter is that neutrality is a myth. There have already been documented harms. For instance, as documented in Bloomberg, AI featured lighter skin Blacks when prompted to create images of CEOs. Fortune showed that AI hiring tools more frequently rejected Black applicants across every industry.

What Aisha Actually Is

Unlike these examples, Aisha is trained on Black sources; not on user data (it uses simulated conversation data). Its web search prioritizes Black media. And beyond this, it uses an Anthropic Claude model as a "second brain" for “hard” questions.

The "understanding vs. answers" line lives here. Aisha flips the premise by centering Black sources, history, and lived experiences whereas most other AIs are trained on the open internet and inherit its biases.

Aisha is known as a conversational AI assistant. It's modeled in the spirit of Victor Hugo Green's original “Green Book”, the survival guide Black people in the US depended on from 1936 to 1966. It's just thrusting the green book into the contemporary digital age, focusing on Black communities, Black-owned businesses, Black cultural knowledge as the primary lens.

Most AI assistants treat Black community context as an afterthought or an add-on. Aisha treats it as the starting point. That distinction shapes every answer it gives - from which businesses it recommends, to how she frames policy impacts, to whose stories it surfaces in a news summary.

Aisha keeps user conversations encrypted and handles personal information securely. This is very important and useful because Black people have been found to have a general distrust of technology, and deservedly so. The internet itself was built for the military.

Real World Consequences

Black workers are overrepresented in jobs that can probably be automated. This may result in many Black workers who will probably lose those jobs. 

There's also disinformation campaigns that have been launched against Black online spaces that provide relevant information to Black communities. For example: in September 2024, African Stream, a Nairobi Kenya-based digital media platform, was severely defunded then collapsed after former U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken publicly accused the pan-African outlet of being a front for Russian covert influence operations.

Aisha may help to mitigate and balance some of these. It has a daily Black history fact (written by Aisha), a streak tracker, a voice feature, and a home feed of articles from Black publishers (The Root, Blavity, The Atlanta Voice, and The Washington Informer). 

Technology is a natural outgrowth of a people's worldview along with their current challenges, experience and their culture. People of African descent are best served by technology that flows from their worldview, culture, challenges, etc. Aisha has made a fine contribution to this effort.