What if Mexico had taken over America or India ended up ruling Britain? A TikTok account is using AI to help illustrate these alternate realities.
- A TikTok account is using AI to illustrate alternative histories where Western powers are colonized instead.
- They use AI art to depict worlds where India conquered Britain, or Mexico took over the US.
What would a world without Western imperialism look like? You can imagine all you want, or you can ask AI.
A TikTok account is turning to image-generator AI tools to depict alternate realities, seeking to answer some "What if" questions that history buffs and people in former Western colonies have always wondered.
The account appears to use the AI tool Midjourney, which turns human prompts into images. A series of these images are strung together to illustrate timelines that deviate from actual history.
"What if India ruled Great Britain?" says the caption on a TikTok video posted by @what.if_ai.
In the post's timeline, a tech renaissance in India would lead to the Indian Armada being the most powerful navy in the world.
And like all other powerful countries of the past, what do they do? They invade someone else — and in this case, it's England that they're seeking revenge from.
India is victorious, and its win sets off a series of events that culminate in Elizabeth II marrying Indian royals, the chart-topping pop band called The Bhangra Boys, and a movie about the boy who lived — Harpreet Patel.
Some details of the narrative seem premised on errors: For instance, the video wrongly asserts that India had a single royal family, and imagines England getting its first native prime minister in 2014, even though there were many before the imagined conquest of England in 1871.
It's not confirmed who manages the account, but the video — which was uploaded on April 17 — has already been viewed 1.7 million times.
The entire TikTok account, which has 27,700 followers, is dedicated to creating AI art that's inspired by alternate realities.
Although it started off by posting videos depicting the British royal family in parallel universes — including one where they had real jobs — the account seems to have found its niche in imagining worlds where Western countries are colonized.
Like this one, which also has 1.7 million views, depicting the US under Soviet rule:
It imagines that if the US-Soviet rivalry went a little differently there would be less inequality and the authorities would redistribute wealth.
However, it appears in the video that celebrity influence on politics will still exist, because we'll have Elvis and Beyoncé as nationalist icons helping drive support for the communist regime.
And God forbid a world where Donald Trump's worst fears come true with the Mexican invasion of the US.
According to this AI-illustrated video with 1.1 million views, there'll be a role reversal with Mexican men occupying white-collar jobs and Americans being forced into menial labor.
Michael Jackson who? Say hello to Miguel Jacson.
And as the race to find the next James Bond heats up, we might finally see some Asian representation — in an alternate timeline where the UK is under Chinese rule. This video has been viewed over 433,400 times since it was uploaded on February 10.
Admittedly, things aren't all that different from the world we already live in.
While we may never be able to see a future without some form of colonialism or another, one thing's for sure: In these imagined worlds free from Western rule, the British Museum would probably be pretty empty.
Correction: May 19, 2023 — This post was edited to clarify that the role of AI in the TikTok posts appears to have been creating imagery, not generating the underlying alternative histories themselves.