StarApple AI Fellowships
All three

Writers, poets, performers

Anansi

Set the rules for consent, credit and payment when a writer's work trains a model.

Places
5
Closes
15 October 2026
Apply
Folded Asante kente cloth in gold, green and blue, woven in narrow strips
Kente Cloth · Asante peoples, Ghana, 19th century · The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1972.56.1), CC0

What is breaking

  • Models were trained on writing whose authors were never asked and never paid.
  • Caribbean and African voices come out of them flattened, or as caricature.
  • Work that used to go to a writer now goes to something cheaper that learned their cadence.
  • A writer who suspects theft has no way to prove it and nowhere to file it.

Your work

  • Define what consent and credit mean when a writer's work is used for training.
  • Build a route for a Caribbean writer to show their work was taken.
  • Set what publishers, festivals and broadcasters have to disclose.
  • Test the argument on working writers before it goes near a ministry.

The name

Anansi carried the stories from Ghana to the Caribbean. In the telling he buys them from the sky god before he is allowed to tell any of them, and the price is steep. Those stories had an owner and a value long before anyone drafted a copyright act.

What you deliver

  1. 01Name the harm using Caribbean evidence rather than figures borrowed from the United States and Europe.
  2. 02Write something a regulator, ministry, school board or publisher can adopt as written.
  3. 03Publish it as a named author.
  4. 04Take it into the rooms where StarApple AI and CAIA already sit with regulators and ministries.

Who applies

Writers, poets, spoken word artists, playwrights, songwriters, editors, literature students and graduates. No AI background needed.

One of the five places goes to someone living in a Caribbean country.

Apply to Anansi

Questions

How long, and how many hours?+

Set with each cohort once the places are filled, so it works around exams and jobs. Regular meetings, work between them, assessments along the way. You see the schedule and the terms in writing before you accept.

Do I need an AI background?+

No. We need your subject knowledge. The AI side is ours to teach.

Can I apply to more than one?+

Pick your strongest. If two genuinely fit, say so and we read you for both.

I am not in the Caribbean.+

Apply. One place in each fellowship is held for someone living in the region. Say how you connect to the work.

Is it remote?+

Meetings run online. Anything in person is optional and covered.

After the deadline?+

We read everything, shortlist, then speak to the shortlist. Everyone hears back.

A Bahamian sloop at anchor in blue water, watercolour by Winslow Homer, 1899 Finance, law, riskCowrie An older man teaching a boy to play a banjo, painted by Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1893 Teachers, educationNyansapo