A Radical Future is Here and Your Agency is up for Grabs. Will you Grab it?

A presentation to a global audience. (deck)

I'm going to be talking about storytelling and principally non-fiction storytelling and what's up for grabs. I’m looking at Cinema Journalism which I'll explain and also the impact of AI which is trending.

Stay to the end because of the community we’re building for a conference in 2024 at Cardiff University. We’ve had some great responses so far, on the back end of a global project 16 Storey’s we’re releasing soon that I think will be enormously helpful to Universities.

For this talk I am going to employ systems thinking research as a way to explain AI storytelling bringing together multiple disciplines. Systems thinking rightly moves us away from singular cause and effect actions.

AI levels the idea that for its participants everything it does is radical, that whatever it yields is original, producing what scientist in the lab call the “wow” syndrome. That's true in some part. Systems thinking helps make sense of this.

I'd like to start with a story about this gentleman here who was born in the Gold Coast in the 1930s. The Gold Coast would win independence from the Britain in 1957. At he age of 25, in 1955, this aspiring police officer sought a new adventure. He moved to the UK.

He was a part of the West African students union. In the UK, he like many of his colleagues had to navigate difficult often traumatic spaces. There was the colour bar. The idea that work was available because of the recent World War which caused a shortage in labour force in the UK, coupled with the UK like every other state looking to rebuild its economy, was all but a fallacy.

Jobs were hard to come by. But primarily his vision, like so many of his other colleagues was to study, enrich his knowledge and return to Ghana.

He was joined by his wife and over the years to come had four children. Juggling the pressures of raising a family and trying to make a living, coupled with the absence of an extended family to take care of the children, meant that the kids were farmed out to white foster parents and some spent time in care.

He bought a house and came to be known as a networker, throwing parties that brought people together. It was said that if anyone coming from Ghana was looking to settle in Tooting, South London, you’d be told to go and pay him a visit.

In spite of some limited successes, he worked, paid his taxes. His wife worked in the NHS paid her taxes. In the 1970s he'd had enough and upped sticks to return to Ghana with the children. Their mother stay behind.

This is the story of my father, Edward Yaw Gyimah, our family, and a story of the 1000s of families who we might know as Windrush.

If you're in the UK, then over the last few months you would have come across Windrush, on television, radio, the newspapers and events. This years marks the 75th anniversary of Windrush which pays respect to the migration of Black and Brown people to the UK 75 years ago on a ship HMT Empire Windrush.

It was one of many ships that people particularly from the West Indies, Caribbean countries used to get to the UK to answer build a new life and answer a calling around labour shortages and job prosperity.

One reason why this ship is significant because it was filmed by Newsreels showing Caribbean people in their Sunday best disembarking from the ship.

What campaigners and advocates have struggled to achieve with recognition of Windrush is to be applauded and is remarkable. Campaigners are still fighting: for compensation from the UK home office for the treatment against the Windrush generation, which includes illegal deportations and rescinding their British status and the life threatening issues that’s yielded.

But there’s almost a growing maturing story now as this headline from a Black British newspaper The Voice shows, published on the 28th July. It’s a wider story of Africans as part of Windrush that’s yet to be told.

That's a reason that underpins my father story, his story and that of many Ghanaians ,West Africans and Africans. Some context is needed. In the 50s onwards Caribbeans were the largest ethnic minority group in the UK.

The 2021 consensus says out of the British population of 59.6M, there are 2.4 million Black ethnic people and that 1.5 million of them identify as Black African (2.5%), compared to 0.6 million as Black Caribbean (1.0%).

So I'd like to tell my father story an African, but how do I go about doing that? I can research his past, but I'm limited by visual material. I could make a documentary based around generic archive, but that would fail to capture some specific points I'd like to make. How do I go about making that story?

This is a two minute promo

How did I tell this story? About 60% of what you watched was AI generated. It included images of my father imagined from the research where he might of been what he would've been doing. After Effects and photoshop was also used.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that close members of my family did not spot images of my father that don’t exist in any of our family’s albums. That’s one is avenue of AI, Generative AI

Generative AI in a nutshell, a branch, subset of AI in which algorithms trained on masses and masses of data, and with high end computing power is capable of turning text into images, videos and sound.

The top two images that opened up my slide deck are AI generated. And then text prompts creating video using Runway. It’s breath taking, and even though there are stray artefacts in the video production, it's important to realise this is really early days so this technology

But this is the question that's been taxing many professionals, experts and creatives. If we can generate this what happens to the livelihood of illustrated artist, photographers and filmmakers?

To create a popular Hollywood film, it represents a clear and present danger and striking actors in Hollywood see this in the rear and front windows want assurances about their future.

Is the perceived disruption by AI as radical as it's been made out to be? Because in many ways we've been here before what's different this time?

In the 1840s or thereabouts Paul Delaroche, a French painter proclaimed “From today Painting is dead”. He was responding to the photographic revolution of the Daguerreotype

Delaroche was a Painter of enormous skill who painted lifelike images, observing perspective and proportionality that had come to characterise traditional Western painting at that time. His painting of Nelson crossing the Alps is a popular one.

Around the 1880s onwards the body that oversaw art, who the artist, where they would exhibit — The Academy De Baux was gradually losing their grip on the art world.

Photography and new styles of art were incredibly disruptive and new styles would emerge. Impressionism, expressionism, cubism and the rest.

In Belgium, I was taken by one artist Pitu who reminded me of Basquiet, whom reminded me off Picasso which reminded me at the African Museum in Belgium, of the Kuba and Kete people and their masks.

In her book When old technologies were New Carolyn Marvin gives us an idea of the impact of electricity and telephone; its incredibly disruption, causing people to lose their jobs and reinventing new ones.

The introduction of television just before the Second World War and after caused huge pain for radio and the newspaper industry. In the 1990s, I was part of disruptive process in which one person would film direct produce and voice in his report. They were called video journalist.

In 1996 for the first time ever two African countries engaged in a coproduction using digital technology. Instead of a large crew we used a very small one. In 2009 onwards social media and mobile technology in journalism disrupted and built new practitioners in Mojo. I made a film on mobile for for a £500,000 project, shown at the famous cinema in the UK where the Lumieres brothers exhibited their first films.

We live with disruption, uncertainty and disequilibrium, incredibly disruptive. So we’ve been here before what’s new with AI? There are answers around, automating, copyright, trademark, the usurping of human intelligence, the risks posed by governments intervening on our rights. Mckinsey and Goldman sachs cite millions of people who’ll lose their jobs. but I'm going to focus on this.

In the African museum in Belgium, I came across this. It said no reciprocal gaze. Colonial films for an African audience were edited differently than colonial films for a European audience. (Black) subjects were not allowed to make films; they would not respond to the gaze of (white) citizens and could not speak with their own voice. How do you the Congolese who featured in colonial films back on that experience and how did Congolese directors look at these films now?

That was indeed an atrocious era, full of despicable acts, the history of king Leopold II. Many decades later and there's been radical behavioural change in examining modern storytelling. If you consider International news, Journalism filmmaking has that gaze so rebuked disappeared? There is a sense of the Black Gaze in stories, AI could add an impetus to this.

In 2019 I got thinking seriously about AI and storytelling. But generative AI wasn’t what it was. A BBC Series Small Axe made by Oscar Winning filmmaker Steven McQueen about Black people’s experience in the UK in the 60s-80s provided a platform to release some facts around my family.

The feedback was overwhelming with others posting their photos or sending me pictures of their folks.

And these were some of the responses on Twitter.

“Henry Bonsu, a respectable UK broadcaster of Ghanaian parentage said our parents suppressed so much trauma during their attempts to make their way in this society the so-called mother country. We we have been affected by that pain in so many ways”

Prof Shirley Thompson OBE, who played an integral part in the Windrush celebrations and also recently in King Charles III coronation as a composer writes

“Thank goodness for a parents and our dreams! Speaking of which please check out my tweet on New Nation Rising: A 21st-century, the concept of the 2012 Olympic opening. Thanks for your filmed profile for the viewmagazine”.

In 2005 I profiled and shot Shirley’s film.

Marcus Ryder, MBE a leading diversity expert and former senior BBC executive said

“I find his quirk of history fascinating say he was black bridge is not an immigrant when he came to the UK has gone I was not a country”.

Marcus is referring to my father’s passport that I showed online that was issued by the colonial office at the time

Professor Aaqill, Ahmed, another leading voice on diversity and former senior executive at the BBC writes

“Lovely David. I got the passport for my dad who had come to the UK. He drove here with his friends, and he tells a story of the journey. Thanks for sharing”.

And then this from Debbie Mayer Hilton RN

“What a lovely story about your parents and family. We all have stories to share. If I can only get the information from my mum that would be a great achievement”.

Then this from Joe Holmes.

“This is making me cry. My dad started to tell us about or what he went through moving to the UK. He finally felt ready to tell us. We had no idea”.

Public officials were equally magnanimous

In April 2023, I had the good fortune and pleasure to meet the former president of Ghana John Kufuor at his house where I shared my research.

He listened and was deeply complimentary at what I was trying to achieve any with another Ghanaian story. This one here, The Kings men, a story about the creation of a secondary school in Ghana between the King of the Ashantis Nana Prempeh and help from a British Reverend Sydney Pearson.

It's the school that the President went to and it's the school I went to when I was taken back to Ghana. We’ve found a way to tell the history of Ghana from 1949 when the school was set up to the present with a number of high-profile interviewees.

Industry feedback I present this. Although this some time back, it provides a timeline of the sort of stories I've been doing and it's one of several recommendations given by leading industry figures in the UK.

You can find out more by googling “David Dunkley Gyimah, reputation, medium”. In Part II, I’ll speak about the relevance of all this in terms of education, commerce, and future proofing.