TED Talks Daily
Beyond the Talk: Salome Agbaroji and Samora Pinderhughes in conversation with TED Talks Daily
07 Sep 2025
The human experience is a very real one that we shouldn’t neglect,” says Salome Agbaroji in a conversation on the intersection between art and AI. Following their performances at TED 2025, spoken word artist Salome Agbaroji and musician Samora Pinderhughes sit down with Elise Hu, host of TED Talks Daily, to talk about their art practice, the importance of art programs in communities, and the impact of artificial technology on human creativity. From different viewpoints, the two discuss how our current technological landscape isn’t something you can turn on and turn off again — and what we must do to not compromise humanity for the sake of technological advancement.LinksSamora's Black Spring Mixtapehttps://www.healingprojectsound.org/2025 MoMA Adobe Creative ResidentFor a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Artificial intelligence is many things, bewildering, exciting, terrifying. But as this technology grows at a rapid pace, a question at the heart of it all remains. How can we make sure we're not forgetting about people?
For spoken word artist Salome Agboruji and musician and composer Samora Pinderhughes, this question is everything. Salome and Samora both performed at this year's TED conference, where Salome asked, as we fall deeper and deeper into the black box, is hoping for humanity the most human thing we can do?
And where Samora sang, are you going to let it go, the ego that remakes the world, that destroys the world? Salome, Samora, and I sat down together after their performances for a special conversation about the role and importance of art and human creativity, how they each view technological advancement, and why art, for art's sake and as an advocacy tool, is more important now than ever before.
Well, thank you both so much for sitting down to talk with us. I actually always really enjoy the performances at TED, but we don't get to hear more fully from the performers and the artists. So just to help the audience familiarize themselves with you, how would you describe what you do as an artist? Who wants to go first?
You can go. Okay. Okay. Hi, yes, I'm Salome Agbaroji. I'm a spoken word poet. I mean, a more formal title is, like, the seventh National Youth Poet Laureate of the U.S., but that has many syllables, and in essence, I just find a lot of joy and passion in using words to really hit the heart of an audience.
I describe myself as a creative writer, but another big part of my work is social advocacy, so... A lot of the issues I advocate on are like arts, arts education, literacy for all people, and just uplifting marginalized voices. And I try to do a good job of using my poetry as a voice to push those messages forward. Samara, what about you?
Yeah, I am a musician, composer, filmmaker, multidisciplinary artist. I work across basically every artistic discipline except maybe movement, which hopefully one day we'll get to, but not right now. I also founded and run an organization called The Healing Project. We are an abolitionist organization that works on creating a world based around healing rather than punishment.
So a lot of my artistic work is about deconstructing narratives around criminality, around who has the right to violence, around structural violence and the effects that that has on our society.
And also on building opportunities for people who have been traumatized by the prison industrial complex, where they can find spaces to tell their stories, but also to find material and communal support there. from each other and to devise the worlds that we want to build that are these alternatives to these systems that we know are deeply violent.
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