After the 1979 revolution, women’s lives in Iran changed dramatically. For over 40 years, they put up with humiliation, inequality and violence. In September 2022, the death in custody of Masha Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian girl, for not wearing her hijab properly, ignited protests around the country. Iranian women had had enough. But despite their bravery, the situation only seems to worsen. Meanwhile, in the US alone, nearly 1.5 million exiled Iranians witness the horror. Powerless.

We decided to show them that the future is not already written. There is still hope.

A.IRAN was created to demonstrate how every action, big or small, makes a difference. This interactive, data-based History book grants us a daunting glimpse into the future of Iranian women, but also the power to change it. This way, everyone can help rewrite tomorrow's story and paint a better future for the people in Iran.

After the 1979 revolution, women’s lives in Iran changed dramatically. For over 40 years, they put up with humiliation, inequality and violence. In September 2022, the death in custody of Masha Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian girl, for not wearing her hijab properly, ignited protests around the country. Iranian women had had enough. But despite their bravery, the situation only seems to worsen. Meanwhile, in the US alone, nearly 1.5 million exiled Iranians witness the horror. Powerless.

We decided to show them that the future is not already written. There is still hope.

A.IRAN was created to demonstrate how every action, big or small, makes a difference. This interactive, data-based History book grants us a daunting glimpse into the future of Iranian women, but also the power to change it. This way, everyone can help rewrite tomorrow's story and paint a better future for the people in Iran.

Since the Islamic revolution, women in Iran have been treated as second class citizens in relation to marriage, divorce, child custody, education, employment, inheritance, political office, and more.

In several areas of their lives, including marriage, divorce, employment, and culture, Iranian women are either restricted or need permission from their husbands or paternal guardians, depriving them of their autonomy and human dignity. For example, the legal age of marriage for girls is 13, and fathers can obtain judicial permission for their daughters to be married at a younger age.

Yet, women and girls are at the forefront of the popular uprising, challenging decades of gender-based discrimination and violence, and defying discriminatory and degrading compulsory veiling laws that result in them facing daily harassment and violence by state and non-state actors, including arbitrary detention, torture and other ill-treatment, and denial of access to education, employment and public spaces.

More change, more action, more voices are needed. A.IRAN brings light to what the future can look like for Iranian women. It sparks radical empathy and inspires action for transformative change.

With International Womens History Month approaching, we wondered: if nothing changes for women in Iran, what story will history books tell?

To answer that question, we used generative AI to write a book about Women’s rights in Iran as if it were 2026. Presented as an interactive web publication, A.IRAN is a 20K+ word exploration of Iranian women’s bleak future, assuming we remain silent. Readers can explore eight chapters with compelling generative imagery covering every aspect of a woman’s life in Iran, from work, to family dynamics, to education, to politics. If readers take action to fight for the cause, be it a donation or a commitment to volunteer, content on the page updates immediately, unveiling a new, more hopeful future before their eyes.

A.IRAN shows how every step in the right direction can literally rewrite a country’s future in real time. 

The strategy was to use A.IRAN as a tool to create noise and public awareness that would add to the pressure on governments in the Global North to take tougher policy stances on Iran.

With no media funding, we looked to key influencers and press to get the word out. We targeted mainly the Iranian diaspora in Northern America (nearly 2 million people) directing them to the site with calls to action across social channels. We explained how AI writes the story of the future based on the events of the present, and how every individual action can help improve the future history for Iranian women.

We encouraged people to join the movement to help rewrite Iran’s future, by interacting with the tool, then taking action to make change–sharing, donating, volunteering.

Every act affects the algorithm and thus the story. A powerful way to show how each act matters today.

We trained an AI model to gather all data related to Iranian women’s situation today and asked it to write us a future vision about women in Iran. This 20K+ word book was the centerpiece of an interactive web experience that allowed readers to witness the bleak future, and then take action to literally rewrite the book in front of their eyes.

We programmed it to react to news, social events, political incidents, economic forces and social media updates that are happening right now to write the book. In addition, we trained and employed generative image models, to create stunning, thought-provoking artwork that complements the stories. This artwork was also used to create a compelling launch video and social assets to introduce A.IRAN and inspire action.

All faces displayed in the artwork, are AI generated as well, so no real people are being exposed to possible persecution, incarceration or worse.

The Iran Democracy Council is less than two years old and run by a dedicated (but exhausted) team of five female Persian-American activists and their networks. Their resources and reach pale in comparison to better known but more broadly applied human rights organizations like Amnesty International.

In the first two weeks of the campaign, A.IRAN saw thousands of people commit to donate and thousands more commit to volunteering. The press and social sharing reached nearly a million people, reminding them of the struggles Iranian women still face in the wake of the Mahsa Amini protests in 2022.

Most importantly, the campaign now functions as a unifying rallying cry for the Iran Democracy Council. As Sara Seyed, co-founder, attorney and filmmaker states “A.IRAN reminds us that actions can rewrite history, and with it, the future of Iran.”

The Iran Democracy Council is focused on advocating for policy change in the US government to maintain pressure on the current authoritarian theocracy in Iran and inspire regime change. The campaign focused primarily on US audiences, where it needed to compete against a variety of other calls for aid, such as the continuing war in the Ukraine.

The goal was not to break through to every household in the US, but to remind the nearly two million members of the Iranian diaspora in North America of the need to unite, and to reintroduce the cause to their allies.