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Hello {{ first name | friends}},
Meeting Chrystian Woods was a bit of serendipity. We were introduced, had a wonderful conversation, and I knew immediately I wanted to feature her work with Empower here. As Chrystian points out, there are big unanswered questions about ownership, attribution, context and power, especially for those who are often left out of the discussion. Please meet Chrystian…
Chrystian, tell me briefly about your background prior to founding Empower.
For more than a decade, I have worked across political campaigns, civic engagement, advocacy, communications, and organizational strategy. I have led statewide organizations, national campaigns, and cross-sector initiatives, often focused on a recurring question: how do we build institutions and infrastructure that give communities more meaningful power?
Over time, that question expanded beyond politics. I became increasingly interested in who controls not only political institutions, but also the stories, technologies, and systems through which people understand themselves and one another.
That curiosity eventually led me toward the intersection of culture, technology, and ownership, particularly as artificial intelligence began changing how creative work is produced, distributed, and reused. Empower grew from that exploration.
Give me the elevator pitch for Empower.
The idea is simple: people should have greater agency over how their stories and creative work are preserved, attributed, remixed, and used by AI systems. We are exploring what it would look like to build infrastructure where consent, attribution, and cultural context are embedded into the architecture from the beginning rather than added after the fact.
And in more detail?
Empower began with storytelling but has evolved into a larger question about infrastructure.
Today, someone can create an oral history, podcast, photograph, curriculum, piece of art, or community archive and have very little control over what happens once that work enters the digital ecosystem. AI makes that challenge even more consequential because creative and cultural material can increasingly become training data, source material, or the foundation for new works.
Empower is exploring a different model.