The Future of Responsible Storytelling in the Age of Creative AI

“Stories without struggle are persuasion, but stories without dignity are violence.” 
     —Lisa Russell, You Will Not Erase Me (2025)

My path into global storytelling began long before I picked up a camera. 

In the late 1990s, while working in humanitarian aid during the Kosovo crisis, I sat with a group of displaced Kosovar women inside the United States Embassy in Tirana, Albania. They described how journalists were reducing their multidimensional lives to a single narrative of sexual violence. The stories being circulated were not untrue, but they were incomplete. 

Their request was simple: do not corner us into a narrative we do not recognize. 

That moment revealed a truth that has shaped every chapter of my work since then – storytelling can restore dignity, or quietly take it away. 

Today, as the world enters a new era driven by generative artificial intelligence (AI), that truth matters more than ever. Creative AI has reshaped how narratives are imagined, produced and shared. It allows us to visualize futures not yet recorded, rebuild scenes never filmed and express metaphors in ways once constrained by financial, geographic or physical limitations. 

Yet the greatest impact of AI is not technological but structural. AI is redistributing narrative power. A young creator in Nairobi can now produce an animated short on a mobile device. A climate advocate in the Amazon can illustrate a possible future for her community. A poet in Beirut can translate her work across languages while preserving cultural nuance. 

This transformation is especially visible among young African creators whose work challenges outdated development tropes and redefines the global imagination. Through ArtsEnvoy.ai and the Africa AI Creator’s Academy, I have trained youth across the continent whose narratives emerge not from external portrayals of poverty or conflict but from Afrofuturism, cultural memory, imagination and pride. 

Creative AI has reshaped how narratives are imagined, produced and shared.

They reinterpret ancestral wisdom through contemporary tools. They blend technology with tradition, grief with renewal, resistance with rebirth. Their work echoes the enduring proverb: “Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.” 

With AI, the lion finally has a pen. 

This shift mirrors what I witnessed during more than two decades curating independent poets, dancers, musicians and filmmakers in high-level United Nations gatherings, which had long been dominated by speeches and institutional messaging. Although often invited under the banner of entertainment, artists served a deeper purpose. We became interpreters and amplifiers, carrying complex global issues into the emotional spaces where people truly listen. 

When artists took the stage, rooms shifted. Delegates leaned forward. Young people felt recognized. Communities felt seen. There were often standing ovations. 

These moments confirmed that independent artists are not accessories to global governance. We are the pulse – the heartbeat – that carries policy from paper to people. 

Creative AI has also expanded my own contributions to United Nations storytelling. In my short film You Decide, which opened the United Nations High-level Multi-Stakeholder Informal Meeting to Launch the Global Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence Governance, AI helped merge memory, ethical AI and human agency for future generations into a powerful visual vocabulary. In Moving On, the first African AI-generated climate music video featuring Nigerian artist AkayCentric, I used AI-powered climate storytelling to reach a wider audience, from AI film festivals, to the 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 29), to UN News. 

In A Canvas Called Home, I used generative AI to reimagine the symbolism of the refugee tent. This piece was featured at the 2025 AI for Good Global Summit as part of Canvas of the Future: AI-Driven Visions of a Sustainable World, an art competition organized by the International Telecommunication Union. 

AI allowed me to craft emotionally rich visual narratives without long-haul flights, expensive equipment or environmentally costly production processes. It reduced my carbon footprint while expanding my creative reach. 

Climate storytelling presents a particular challenge. Climate impacts are vast, abstract and difficult to visualize in ways that resonate emotionally. Creative AI offers new possibilities to bridge this gap by allowing storytellers to personify our planet, imagine underwater or post-climate futures, and build visual metaphors that make the crisis more tangible and emotionally legible. 

We are losing the narrative war on the climate crisis not because the science is unclear, but because we do not yet have enough stories, and the stories we do have do not always reach people at the emotional level necessary to inspire action. 

Climate storytelling presents a particular challenge.

For frontline and Indigenous communities who have carried ecological knowledge for generations but whose perspectives remain underrepresented, creative AI, when used responsibly, can help amplify their stories and rebalance who gets to shape environmental narratives. 

My work in these United Nations spaces has underscored another essential truth: storytelling and institutional communications serve fundamentally different mandates. Institutional communications must prioritize clarity, neutrality and diplomacy; their purpose is coherence, not catharsis. Storytelling, by contrast, is emotional, textured, and often uncomfortable. It carries memory, interprets power and brings imagination and humanity into spaces that policy alone cannot reach. 

Both are essential, but they are not interchangeable. 

When institutions reference “the power of storytelling”, they often mean persuasive messaging. But messaging is not storytelling, and storytelling without dignity risks sliding into narrative distortion. 

For this reason, “artivism” – artistic practice rooted in social insight, power analysis and community truth-telling – remains irreplaceable. Artivism cannot be led from within institutions. Its legitimacy depends on being artist-led. Its purpose is to surface realities that institutions may not yet be prepared to confront while translating urgency into forms that invite dialogue rather than division. 

And importantly, bold artistic storytelling should not be seen as a threat to global diplomacy. When curated with care, it becomes an invitation – to listen more closely, to expand what is politically imaginable and to bring public sentiment and community insight into diplomatic spaces in ways that strengthen, rather than disrupt, global dialogue. Artist-led storytelling does not undermine diplomacy – it enriches it. 

As AI expands global participation in creative expression, this artistic guidance becomes even more essential. Without it, institutions risk confusing promotion with narrative and representation with appropriation. If AI storytelling is shaped by industry, we get content. If it is shaped by artists, we get culture. 

To navigate this new terrain, global institutions need a grounding ethic. Narrative justice offers such a framework. It recognizes that storytelling is a form of power shaped by inclusion and exclusion, framing and erasure, authorship and authorization. It acknowledges that when institutions define storytelling without independent artists, we risk losing the cultural specificity, emotional intelligence and lived experience that give narratives their integrity. 

Narrative justice also recognizes an often-unspoken reality: advocating for authentic storytelling within institutional spaces can come with personal or professional cost. Yet that resistance only underscores why narrative justice must guide global storytelling in the age of AI. 

People increasingly seek authenticity over messaging, lived experience over abstraction and emotional truth over institutional tone.

Public expectations of communication are shifting rapidly. People increasingly seek authenticity over messaging, lived experience over abstraction and emotional truth over institutional tone. If global communication is to meet the moment – especially as AI accelerates creative expression – it must return to storytelling as a shared cultural and ethical practice rooted in community voice and narrative integrity. 

Institutions cannot become the storyteller, but they can support storytellers. The United Nations has an opportunity to lead by strengthening multistakeholder groups such as the Arts and Culture ImPACT Coalition; creating formal entry points for AI filmmakers, poets, designers and cultural workers; promoting equitable access to creative AI tools; and developing dignity-centered guidelines for AI-generated media that protect human rights, artist rights and narrative sovereignty. 

The evolution of youth participation in United Nations processes shows what is possible. Once treated primarily as beneficiaries, young people are now recognized as essential contributors to climate action, peacebuilding and global policy design. A similar evolution is needed for an intergenerational global community of artists, especially as AI accelerates narrative transformation. 

These steps ensure that storytellers – especially those historically marginalized or working independently – can speak for ourselves. 

As the United Nations advances its work on AI governance, the question is no longer whether AI will reshape storytelling; it already has. The urgent question is whether dignity, inclusivity and justice – in both content and representation – will guide that evolution. 

I learned long ago, in a quiet room in Tirana, that dignity is the foundation of every story worth telling. Creative AI now offers the world an opportunity to honor that truth by building a future where narrative justice shapes global storytelling – and where the lion, not the hunter, finally gets to tell its own story.