GenAI helped me to tell true historical stories of my family. You can too.
I was shocked. Why are there relatively few inspiring historical films made by local talent from the global South? Next, can you name all these people above and what they have in common? Answers below.
For the first question, it’s because governments prohibited local talented people from making films. But not all people. Mainly if you were indigenous African.
During the 18th to mid-20th century, European colonial powers controlled filmmaking in their African colonies. Africans were restricted from filmmaking and hence there’s little archive of their lived experiences from their perspectives.
The reason was the authorities didn’t want any narratives that countered their agenda. There was the 1934 Laval Decree in French colonies that prevented Africans from making their own factual films. A film exhibition, I visited, at The Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, reveals more about how this was enacted in the Congo.
In fictional films they were breakthroughs with Mouramani (1953) directed by Mamadou Touré; Afrique sur Seine (1955) by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra; and Ousmane Sembène’s Borom Sarret (1963). In this post I’m focusing on factual and news.
In English speaking African countries, the British had their ways. A ban wasn’t implemented but controlling permits, censorship and indirect controls were designed to stop Africans filmmaking.
Could GenAI help create factual films from that era, and why is it important?
AI Gathering
This month some of the UK’s top experts in AI gathered at a conference, Storytellers + Machines in Manchester. I showed them the photo at the top of this post and asked if anyone could name all the people and what they had in common. How well did you score?
They struggled a bit. The second answer is they’re all of Ghanaian descent.
Ghana has a land mass of 238,533 sq km that’s almost the same as the UK at 243,610 sq km. Its population is almost half of the UK; around 35m compared to the UK’s 68m. And there are about 114,000 Ghanaian-born Brits in the UK.
But, you’ll find Brit-Ghanaians, like those above in all walks of creative, academic, political and businesses life in the UK, and many at the top of their game.
Two questions. Firstly, how come? Secondly, what of the influence and journey of their parents who came to the UK in the 50s/60s/70s? Wouldn’t you like to know? Would it yield patterns that answer my first question about cultural traits of Ghanaians?
For the second question you’re likely to come unstuck because of a likely lack of archive which may hold secrets to answer the first question.
And that’s where GenAI comes in.
It’s Personal
The story now becomes personal because I’m not famous but some time back someone at the UK’s leading newspaper for Black people in the Britain, The Voice Newspaper, stuck me into a list of the UK’s 61 most influential Ghanaians. I’m nestling at 36. Huh!
That prompted me to ask about my parent’s journey from Ghana to the UK, and what traits might have been passed onto me. When I was a kid I wanted to be an artist and writer. Years later, I’d become an artist in resident at the UK’s leading arts centre, The Southbank Centre, and a journalist working at the BBC, Channel 4 and ABC News. How was I influenced by my parents?
In the guise of that BBC programme that unravels histories and family connections, Who Do You Think You Are? I set out to trace my parent’s past starting with my dad, and AI would be integral in bringing his story to life.
My dad was a fascinating figure, but I knew relatively little about him until he passed away in 2006 in the UK. Our parents rarely shared details about their past. He was a policeman and apparently used his detective skills in Ghana to track a woman he fancied. That would be my mum. Isn’t that called stalking now?
He was one of the first wave of Afro-Ghanaians to leave what was then called the Gold Coast in 1955 to travel to the UK on a study scholarship. The Gold Coast became Ghana in 1957.
In the UK, like many Africans and Caribbeans, the colour bar prohibited him from pursuing his interests, but he became a local celebrity amongst Ghanaians in South London and helped many Ghanaians settle in the UK. He was the go-to man. Him and mum knew how to throw parties.
Our parents had four children in the UK. Then, in the 70s they’d had enough and took us back to Ghana. In Ghana, Dad was being fêted to become the leader of a political party, but fell out with advisors so he became a business man travelling to hundreds of countries.
We discovered this from his written letters unearthed from 20 years ago since he passed away. I also went back to Ghana last year to the small dusty town where I grew up, Asokore, near Kumasi, to research his past with local people and neighbours. I also visited the national newspaper The Daily Graphics’ digital archive.
So where’s the AI? From my research, the information I gathered provided guidance of creating scenes, images and situations my dad would find himself in. Using GenAI with markers to train it, and witness testimonies, I conceived the scenes and illustrations of what was likely at the time; some from memory. Funnily enough my family got to asking me of photos (a digital twin) of a young looking dad they’d never seen before.
That’s not real then, you’d say. Well what do you mean by real? Is my memory of what I conceive as true or likely to be, easily dismissed? And name one technology over history that has not challenged perceptions and philosophies of truth and realism. Is it time for a reboot?
In the 1400s, the printing press would lead to the perception that memory (which was cherished since the Roman Simonides of Ceos 556 BC) was under threat. Simonades made public the Memory Palace.
Copernicus in 1543 challenged perceived wisdom with a heliocentric model of the sun at the centre of the solar system with planets revolving around it. He feared for his life.
The Age of Enlightenment (17th-18th centuries) challenged the status quo. Rational reasoning, Western philosophy and scientific inquiry would gain in prominence. Note I say Western philosophy, because there were differences in African philosophies which I write about here. Then Quantum physics rewrote what we considered immutably true about Newtonian laws.
The 1800s photograph upended what was considered real against personal memory in paintings. French painter Paul Delaroche seeing an early camera, the daguerreotypes, in 1840 proclaimed, “From today, painting is dead!”
The camera couldn’t lie, until it did.
And what about this from a national treasure David Hockney The Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters. At the end of the book is a startling revelation where two art movements are laid side by side; Byzantine art and Impressionism. It’s as if 500 years of perspective, and camera- influenced images e.g. David did not exist. Could personal cameras in our era become defunct? Do you see cameras in that icon for spotting future hardware, Star Trek?
There’s more stories I could spew out, but I’ll conclude by recounting a conversation with an AI expert, with a Doctorate in AI. I agree with his views. It is that we’re entering different realities of what is considered real, with different cultures and cultural points of views challenging beliefs. Our future skillset is acknowledging and navigating varying portals of the human experience.
The squidgely lines on Hockney’s tweet above is evidence of these new realities that have manifested themselves more so in the social media era. It’s possible to speak of in-camera archive ( shot at the time) and Synth archive (made with AI).
Two documentaries I watched recently used personal recollections from interviewees. Commando: Britain’s Ocean Warriors (2022), and Netflix’s Battle of the Baddest (2024) both mix testimonial with artistic illustrations. How different is that to the use of Gen AI, I asked. A caveat I say is Gen AI should be clearly labelled.
Then there’s the question of how soon can an event be classified as archival and be capable of being rendered in AI? These are questions for the artists, the respect for their audiences, transparency, and a wider diverse cross-section of experts being in engaged in these questions.
In 2035, this post will be a moot one as Police use GenAI to recreate scenes of a crime, and block chain technology creates networks where AI filmmakers can be seen as trusted. Then we’ll be using AI to create films of new histories; what happens if in your life you took a different road on the fork. Don’t laugh! The BBC not too long ago had a programme called “IF” edited by my former head at Channel 4 News Peter Barron. And I suspect AI will no longer be called AI, a business proposition, in order to remove concerns.
Global Entrepreneurs and AI
I’ve showed the trailer of my dad’s story at various conferences to generous feedback. More recently from this image above at the UK Black Business Entrepreneurs Conference created by Dr Carlton Brown and his incredible team. It’s where international entrepreneurs of colour gather and worth a visit. It’s hosted annually at Natwest Conference Centre in the heart of London.
What’s next, I was asked ? Between 1992–94 I was a freelance correspondent in what was the end days of Apartheid South Africa; another region that prohibited Black people from making films.
Recently we uncovered a huge array of audio archive that’s been re-digitised. They include several reports across the country; some quite daring, such as riding with Peace Monitors through what was then a dangerous zone. I used memory to reconstruct the visual experience. When will podcasters be using AI to retell their stories visually?
I had the honour of opening the conference with a new AI-film I made on Women Empowerment. Empowered, depicts a storyline that many people could relate to as a young girl dreams her way to the ultimate goal. Here’s a sample of the film.
And then there’s the global magazine we put together, with the work of Masters students, entrepreneurs, and lecturers, on the AI programme I lead at Cardiff University, but that’s another story for a new post in Gen AI.
In the mean time, what are your thoughts and Gen AI’s use of factual stories? And what films would you make?
End ++
Hi my name’s David and I run a programme in AI at Cardiff University, and have been heavily involved in AI since 2015. I’ve been described by various media as a leading UK videojournalist, and I’ve had the pleasure in my career of working with a range of experts and national figures, such as Jon Snow. For more stories like this you can follow me here and on Twitter (x) and Linkedin.
