Thread by @ai_rawls

I don't think people have fully grasped the power of full stack AI (e.g. combining transcription, editing, and visual generation) when it comes to helping engage with and grow or augment 'accepted norms' around culture and history. #AI #dalle2 #culture #history #art #gpt3

Personal histories are something that have historically been the preserve of privileged communities; with people from immigrant backgrounds, or those that have a rich history of oral storytelling, often having a much 'thinner' sense of their own sense of place. #dalle2 #immigrant

There are over 300m first generation immigrants globally; when you factor in second and third generation immigrants, along with migrants from nomadic or other similar communities the impact of this is well over a billion individuals. #dalle2 #AI #art #immigrant #nomad #history

To highlight the power of AI visualisation tools in sharing personal stories from marginalized communities we're taking a few choice passages from 'The Last Kings of Shanghai' a phenomenal book on the history of East Asias Baghdadi Jewish diaspora and illustrating them:
#AI

(1) Through the darkened streets, the richest man in Baghdad fled for his life. Just hours earlier, David Sassoon’s father had ransomed him from the jail where Baghdad’s Turkish rulers had imprisoned him, threatening to hang him if the family did not pay an exorbitant tax bill.

(2) Now a boat lay waiting to take thirty-seven-year-old David to safety. He tied a money belt around his waist and donned a cloak. Servants had sewn pearls inside the lining. It was 1829. His family had lived in Baghdad as virtual royalty for more than eight hundred years.

(3) David left Baghdad in a state of rage and helplessness. As the ship sailed away, he turned toward the disappearing shore and wept David landed at Burshire, a port city controlled by Iran beyond the reach of the Turks.

(4) The man who had once planned to become the Nasi of Baghdad became the peddler of Bushire. Careful to wear his expensive Arab robes and turban, he put his fluency in multiple languages to work, talking in Arabic to Arab sea captains and Hebrew to his fellow Jewish refugees.

(5) He met the British representatives of the East India Company. The British wrote that they admired the heightened “dignity of his appearance” and urged him to consider moving to Bombay to set up a company there.

(6) He was driven by something almost Shakespearean—not a poor refugee struggling to seek a better life but a royal scion who had his birthright ripped from him and was now determined to win it back, if not in Baghdad then elsewhere.

(7) Landing in Bombay, David Sassoon joined the British Empire at the height of its political and economic power. Almost one-third of the world was under British control, including parts of India, Australia, Malaysia, Syria, and Egypt.

(8) The British had crushed Napoleon in Europe and commanded the world’s largest navy. Power and money flowed through London, the world’s largest city. For decades, the British East India Company had held a state-sanctioned monopoly on trade within India and Asia.

(9) Jews might never be accepted in Bombay’s British clubs, but their property and businesses were now legally protected—more than had ever been the case, even in Baghdad. And the new British ruler of the city was a proven friend to the Jews.

(10) David became an Anglophile, he hired tutors to teach his sons the English language and British history. However, all three of the Sassoons wore the clothes of Baghdad—white shirts with billowing white trousers bound at the ankle; embroidered turbans and dark robes.

(11) He started buying out ports and got the first pick of goods before they reached the bazaars. When ships sailed away, half their cargo holds were filled with Sassoon merchandise destined for England. Mingling with captains on the docks gave him key commercial intelligence.

(12) David became a bridge between the traditional trading practices of the Middle East and the global system developing under the British Empire. He ordered that the Sassoon branding be on office stationery. and that company checks be printed in both Hebrew and English letters.

(13) He switched to the more formal accounting system of ledgers and bookkeeping entries used by the major British firms. David recognized that he needed to be flexible to succeed, and to preserve his own identity and values even as he navigated a new and powerful empire.

(14)He swore loyalty to the British Empire. But his Judaism and outsider status softened the harder edges of his embrace of colonialism. The Sassoons had supported charity extensively and continued to do so in Bombay, building synagogues and supporting Jews who fell into poverty.

(15) David set up the equivalent of a Sassoon company town, designed to attract Jewish refugees, first from Baghdad and then from across the Ottoman Empire, and turn them into loyal employees.

(16) They enrolled in the David Sassoon Benevolent Institution, where, using textbooks David commissioned, the teenagers were taught Arabic, geography, arithmetic, bookkeeping, and Hebrew.

(17) They were then hired as clerks to keep track of purchases and sales in the Sassoon warehouses, or sent to negotiate the sale of bales of cotton with British buyers. Employees who retired and lacked family to look after them were given money for food.

(18) Less than a decade after arriving in Bombay, David Sassoon was one of the richest men in India. The British governor of Bombay hailed him as “the first of our non-European merchants in wealth and responsibility.” He was just getting started.

If you found this thread interesting please check out Project Timemachine at rawls.ai/cultural/ . It's a nonprofit team seeking to use AI technology to bring hidden stories to life! They're currently on the hunt for both technical and creative contributors.