We used generative AI to craft a story about Women’s rights in Iran as if it were 2026. This 20K+ word exploration of Iranian women’s bleak future, assumes we remain silent. If readers take action, content on the page updates immediately, unveiling a new, more hopeful future. A.IRAN demonstrates how actions today can literally rewrite a country’s future.

A.IRAN uses GPT-3/4 and Generative Art/Video trained on Iranian history to write the story and create stunning and thought-provoking artwork. Real-time social, sentiment, search, and news data feed back into the AI to update the stories as new events unfold.

For more than 40 years, Iranian women have suffered discrimination and violence under the Islamic Regime. In September 2022, the death in custody of Mahsa Amini a 22-year-old Iranian girl for not wearing her hijab properly ignited protests all around the country. Iranian women had had enough. Despite their protests, resilience, and bravery the rights of women in Iran are still being violated every day.

The Iran Democracy Council, a group out women attorneys and activists of Iranian descent, wanted to let the world know what is happening—and how bad it could be if nothing is done. They wanted to inspire action.

Could we show that history is not yet written and that every action today can change the narrative? We decided to use AI to get a glimpse into what the future holds for Iranian women, depending on what’s done to help shape it.

We wondered: if nothing changes for woman 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.

This is a book that only an AI could write. Feeding an AI model with data made it possible to not only envision the bleak future Iranian women are facing today, but to illustrate that it is still possible to rewrite it. Using an out-of-the-box large language model blindly was not an option. The model training was an exercise in data collection and filtering to ensure that the story reflected the reality about women’s struggles in Iran, and ignored the pro-regime propaganda that the current theocracy manufactures.

As powerful as the story is on its own, the campaign goal was to inspire action, so we needed the book to be responsive to readers who took action. Adjusting the model to provide not just a single output, but multiple ones depending on the level of commitment and on real time data was essential to achieve the Iran Democracy Council’s goals.

With the exception of the Foreword and the About Us page, every single word and image in the book was written by a large language model, trained explicitly on contemporary Iranian history since the 1979 revolution. The data that was curated into the model and prompts literally crafted the creative in the campaign, telling the story from the perspective of AI that simply mapped the linear progression of how things are to how they would be in three years.

Moreover, the data used to create the story is evolving as history unfolds. The inputs take into account current conversation about Iran on Reddit (a pivot, after Twitter shut down their API), news and current events, and even Google Trends data on popular relevant searches to make sure that the book adjusts to reflect any new data that comes in.

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 to 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.