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Lumi Story founder and CEO Colin Kaepernick speaking on stage at day 2 of Web Summit Qatar 2026 | Photo By Shauna Clinton/Sportsfile for Web Summit Qatar via Getty Images
Nearly ten years after Colin Kaepernick first took a seat, then a knee, and then, a forced retirement from football, the former QB blitzed Atlanta school leaders with a sales pitch: justice.
On February 24 of this year, Kaepernick hosted a close door dinner with local educational leaders. An eyeblack source familiar with the event said that the roughly 20 people in attendance, nearly all of them Black, listened as the former 49er explained why he believed minoritized students lacked access to artificial intelligence. And why a partial solution to his next fight for racial equality was a prompt away.
Lumi Story, the once-NFL star’s generative AI educational venture, enables students to manifest images, dialogue, and plot by entering a few short, conversational directives. The experience is immediately familiar to anyone who has used ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. But unlike those tools, Lumi scaffolds its foundational models—the company hasn’t revealed which existing genAI that Lumi uses to sources information—with privacy and content protections for children. The company’s website says its guardrails result in “classroom-safe AI that elevates creativity, confidence, and literacy outcomes.”
A source familiar with Kaepernick’s Atlanta meeting told eyeblack that the superintendents, school board members, and education advocates freely discussed their desire to incorporate AI, less as an equity play, but an emerging cost saving measure. At least one area school district had already launched with Kaepernick in November, and guests from neighboring districts discussed their desire to build K-12 “AI schools”—some have already launched or are in development—that went beyond teaching tech literacy, but using AI tech to play an active role in instructing students.
Intimate, invite-only fireside chats with influential education officials are part of Kaepernick’s playbook. As a contemporary civil rights leader known for his influential police brutality protest—one Oakland Unified School District official who attended a similar meeting described Kaepernick as an “icon and legend”—he carries a particular clout when describing his tech entrepreneurship as an extension of his activism. Yet, for the school leaders present, it was a pretext they hardly needed for decisions they had already made.
‘Different times. Same struggle’
Slop is overused in modern parlance, especially when it’s lazily suffixed to disparage a trend without an actual critique. But at least it is a word, one that is shockingly more coherent than the content emitted by Lumi.
“Freedom fought, lof wealth” (emphasis mine) reads one panel from the cover of a high schooler’s Lumi-generated graphic novel. The same comic labels an AI-illustrated comparison of Jim Crow-era water fountains with the caption “INEQUALITY IS MASTTRA INTO LAW,” the apparent verb composed by a blurred hieroglyph loosely resembling the English alphabet. (It’s the kind of hallucination immediately familiar to anyone consuming1 fruit infidelity TikTok reels.) Another high schooler’s AI-generated graphic novel, this one explaining climate change, contorts “dioxide” to djonice, one of a handful of panels decorated with Lumi’s word-adjacent letterfarts.