I wanted to build a world.
A world that felt real to me, with its own architecture, infrastructure, and legends. A world where the people of the East and South were never colonized by the West. Where we arrived at this moment in history - our moment - on our own terms, with our own knowledge systems intact.
I could see it clearly: Polynesian-inspired vessels powered by the waves, wind, and sun instead of petrol. Treescrapers and architectural wonders that grow with and around the earth instead of leveling it. Reconnaissance drones in flight alongside the Tigmamanukan bird that inspired it - black and blue blurs in the sky providing the foresight to hunters, travelers, and warriors alike. Farmers in their cultural dress that reads the soil, air moisture, and weather patterns, and hunting dogs with a second-skin armor that alerts guardhouses and scouts. Our people co-evolving their culture and technologies with their land, in the native spirit of oneness with everything around it: kapwa.
I opened Midjourney to create this world. I started with simpler things first: blending technology with nature, without the precolonial references. I wanted to work progressively: introducing concepts prompt-by-prompt as each previous image was able to capture the vision. But even at this early point, the model was pushing into different directions. Sometimes, it even did the complete opposite of what was asked.
(In Midjourney, you can add references to guide the model. Below, I added the tree from the previous image set for likeness, and the bronze mirror for pattern.)
This image set was a turning point for me. None of the images in the set resembled the tree reference nor my prompt. I asked for a dense forest, I got a few trees and a normal forest canopy in the background. I asked for tree trunks with bark transitioning into metal and light, I got bark baskets, electricity bolts, and rubber cabling around branches. The pattern of the mirror was lost completely, erased and replaced. Midjourney generated its own aesthetic faithfully across the image set, drawing from references only its dataset knows.
Midjourney’s model was built in-part on the dataset from LAION, a German non-profit that scraped publicly available images on the internet. The specific dataset, LAION-5B, contained 2.3 billion images which were gathered without any human-in-the-loop. Which raises the question: who has access to the internet, computers, and cameras? Historically, the Global North. Rest Of The World’s research into Midjourney’s model reveals its biases against the Global South: when asked to generate Beijing, it produces abandoned ancient Chinese ruins. When asked to generate Indonesian food, it produces meals exclusively on banana leaves. When asked to generate a Mexican person, it produces a middle-aged man in a sombrero.
Rest Of The World, “How AI reduces the world to stereotypes”
How could this model generate kapwa - oneness with everything - when it never knew it existed, let alone how we had made it real? Our histories were passed on generation-by-generation through oral and physical traditions, encoded on paper and living today in archives untouched by a scanner. It exists, just not where models can find it.
While working with Midjourney, I started to publish some images on Instagram with the worldbuilding narrative in parallel. These images were compromises on my original vision, but I wanted to close the loop and publish regardless.
The narrative features an archivist that finds themselves transported to this alternate universe without knowing how or why. They begin to explore, document their findings, and react to this new reality. Originally, I wanted this character to explore the land with us and interact with the locals. Through this character, the audience also holds the perspective as a foreigner encountering everything for the first time with wonder, fear, and reverence.
When I realized that Midjourney was not capable of bringing my visions to life, I pivoted the narrative to compromise with that too. I introduced a native virus that infects the archivist’s memory and eventually pulls them back into our modern world. This was a creative parallel to what I was experiencing: I was unable to build my world because to my tools, it never existed.
I named this project [ i remember it differently ] before knowing the deeper meanings it would hold.
In the end, I grew impatient with Midjourney’s limitations and the compromises I had to make, so I shelved the project mid-story. I know that now there are more advanced models, more powerful tools that I could use, but our histories still haven’t been uploaded. To continue with this project, I’ll have to create my own model, trained on our archives. This is where it has to go next.
