In the early days, the men didn’t use their names or show their faces.
In 2014, Daphne C. Watkins, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work, created the YBMen project to help young Black men talk about mental health and masculinities (which she keeps plural to emphasize multiple forms).
The initial idea was to have them meet in person, but she soon realized that wasn’t going to happen.
“The guys were like, ‘Nope, don’t want to see anybody, don’t want to know who I’m talking to. I really want to hide behind this computer screen and just spill my guts about how I feel and what I’m thinking,’” Watkins recalls.
She moved the program to Facebook, encouraging participants (mostly college students between 18 and 30) to use avatars and aliases. Watkins also asked the men to disregard her credentials. The YBMen program wasn’t meant to be a data-driven academic exercise, but a way for Black men to connect and confide in each other using social media and pop culture.
“The intent was, we’re not going to present a bunch of scientific, technical statistics and things like that for participants to discuss,” she says. “We’re actually going to talk about this new song by Lil Wayne and how he’s talking about mental health and suffering. Or, ‘Hey, did you see the news about Ray Rice and what happened to him?’”
For many guarded men, a screen can make them feel safe enough to speak up about their struggles. Avatars and aliases offer protection, the chance to be heard without being exposed. In one 2014 experiment at the University of Southern California, people who believed a virtual interviewer was automated (not human-controlled) were less afraid to be open and showed their sadness more intensely.
Now, more than a decade later, the one on the other side of the screen might not be human at all. AI-powered platforms give Black men new ways to express themselves privately, but this shift raises critical questions: Who built it? Who was it built for? Can something that’s not human understand Black men’s experiences well enough to support them?
‘Curiosity is the grease’
Grappling with questions like these, Philip Butler, a scholar working across neuroscience, technology, spirituality and Black studies, developed his own AI-powered self-guided mental health app, InnerLight.
On the site, a yellow orb pulses against a black void. You click begin. It asks whether you’ve done inner work like this before and how deep you want to go. Then it invites you in:
“You’re about to enter your parts room — the space where we’ll meet the different parts of who you are. Your parts room is here to safely allow you to meet each part of you with curiosity and care. There’s nothing you need to do right now. Just notice what’s present.”
Still in its early stages, InnerLight evolved out of Butler’s Seekr Project, a research foundation created to keep people grounded in the whirlwind of negative images and news cycles. He says he wanted to move away from reactive tactics like social media blackouts toward proactive, imaginative uses of technology. It’s built on Internal Family Systems, a therapy model that treats the mind as a set of distinct parts.
“I’m a husband, I’m a father, I go to work, I’m about to go to the dentist,” he says. “There’s all these hats that I wear. In these different spaces, I’m a different version of myself. And what does it mean to be able to get to know the different versions of myself and not force myself into a unitary framework of existence? Curiosity is the grease.”
Butler sees the platform as a place for Black men to spend time unpacking what they already say they know. But when he rolled out InnerLight as a test this year in a district of his Omega Psi Phi fraternity, acceptance was slow. Many men were reluctant for various reasons, including the fact InnerLight uses OpenAI for 30-day storage, he says.
“It’s all these layers you have to work through to show Black men this is here for you,” he says. “To be completely transparent, until we have enough money and compute to build our own models, we are fine-tuning on top of frontier models.”
Mainstream AI, he says, wasn’t built with Black men in mind.
“It’s not trained for you, it’s not going to take you seriously, it’s not built on your experiences, it doesn’t use your perspective as the primary one,” he says. “But ours does.”
Tech Support?
About half of Black adults (49 percent) say they use AI chatbots, which matches the average of U.S. adults overall, according to a 2026 Pew Research Center survey.
A 2026 KFF poll found that 21 percent of Black adults said they used AI for mental health advice in the past year, compared with 12 percent of white adults. KFF also found that 29 percent said they trust chatbots a great deal or fair amount for reliable mental health information, compared with 20 percent of white adults.
These tools are just a click away and less expensive than regular therapy sessions. But turning to AI can come at a cost, according to Victoria Bangieva, a Chicago-based clinical psychologist and a member of APA’s Mental Health Technology Advisory Committee. In an APA article, she notes the tools can miss context, reinforce unhealthy coping behaviors or stand in for human connection.
A 2026 KFF analysis of research pointed to racial gaps in how AI handles mental health. In a 2024 study, language-based AI models were worse at predicting how severe depression was for Black participants than for white participants, based on Facebook posts. Even models trained only on Black participants’ language performed poorly.
The study’s authors suggested that depression “may not manifest in language for Black individuals,” or that other factors beyond language (such as speech rate or tone) might be better predictors.
Tools of Tomorrow
Cordell Sloan, an information technologist and founder of Intelligent Soft Systems, says AI has its limits but can still help when it comes to emotion management and mental health.
A deeply experienced therapist would be ideal, he says, but in his estimation, “if you can get 70 percent there from your couch using your iPad or phone, and over time resolve those issues, yes, it’s a plus. In the short term, we start using what we have. It’s just that we’re not yet accustomed to the fact that it’s not a person, so society is adjusting to that.”
A self-described nerd, raised in Tennessee by a preacher father who was active in the Civil Rights movement, Sloan sees AI as an avenue for practical change.
In collaboration with Prudence Carter, a sociologist at Brown University, he is building an AI-powered reading app, adaptive to different learning styles, for neuroatypical readers. It will be the prototype, he says, for customizable education platforms and other models that are Black-owned.
“Some of us have to look through these telescopes, microscopes, these tools that let us see beyond our normal capacities to understand what’s going on and act appropriately in that larger context,” he says. “Black folks, however, because we’re not invited and owning these spaces, oftentimes, don’t see what’s relevant to our experience. We don’t see what’s affecting us. Or we see it too late, or it’s too complex and we don’t understand it.”
Sloan wants public policy on AI, no different from how we regulate dangerous weapons, and educational material so people don’t make inadvertent mistakes.
“We must not continue in the posture of a victim,” he says. “The injury is a fact. Agency is a choice.”
Cutting Through the Noise
Every click presents a choice in the digital age. And with the YBMen project now running mostly through Instagram, Watkins has to compete with a constant barrage of conflicting online content about what it means to be a man.
“If we’re promoting progressive masculinities and gender equality, and working on your mental health, and real men cry and real men can admit their vulnerabilities, there are two million other messages that are saying the exact opposite,” she says. “Our ability to push our positive content is really a challenge because we’re outnumbered, frankly. We’re competing for time. We’re competing for space.”
In her programs, the kind of space the men wanted initially changed over time. When COVID hit, she says, the isolation and loneliness prompted participants who used to hide behind screens to step out and connect in person.
“‘Is it okay if we meet up for coffee?’” she recalls them asking her. “‘Can we get T-shirts made for the program?’”
She has also been surprised by the intergenerational reach, hearing Black men say: “‘Everything I’m learning in this program, I’m sharing with my little brother, or I’m sharing it with my grandfather, and talking with them about what I’m learning and why we need to do better with our mental health as men.’”
This is especially meaningful to Watkins because this work started from a personal place: growing up, watching her father struggle.
“I just always wondered how might his life had been different had someone opened up opportunities for him to talk, to express himself, to talk about his frustrations or his trauma from the past instead of turning to substances,” she says. “What might his life have been like had he had a group of Black men to talk to?”
This is why she says “research is me search.” And the men’s desire to keep the conversation going shows how care and concern transcend any technology.
“I cannot tell you the number of times that we have been wrapping up a program, and the guys involved have said, ‘Hey, Dr. Watkins, do you mind if we keep this going? Do you mind if I get everyone’s email address and we decide to meet on the weekends or go to the gym or hang out together?’ I feel like that consistency, that continuity, is the best way to describe love.”
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Brotherly Love is a six-part digital series about the emotional and social lives of Black men through the science of love.
Funding for this series was provided by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, as part of its “Spreading Love Through the Media” initiative, supported by the John Templeton Foundation, Acton Family Giving, and Unlikely Collaborators.
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