Working on my Book and Finding My Voice with AI

I won't spill all the beans about my upcoming book just yet but imagine squeezing your eyes and peeking through your lashes while reading this blog and you get an idea of some of the topics and what it will be about.

This book delves into my transformation, becoming Muslim in a post-9/11 world, preserving my Jewish heritage, and rediscovering my grandfather's untold World War II story. It's a tale of resilience against the backdrop of a century marked by division, oppression, and the battles of the 'war on drugs' and 'war on terror' and the psychological war for our attention.

With the opportunity of AI unfolding right in front of me, as Microsoft is one of the frontrunners on this, I couldn't leave the opportunity to bring my own stories to life with the power of AI!

AI is nothing new and has been a great help to me for many years!

AI has been a trusted companion on my journey for many years, aiding me in my studies with dyslexia, ensuring grammar and spelling correctness, and making learning more accessible. Now, as I finish my course in "Generative AI for Writing, Research, Analytics, and Prototyping" winter school at the University in Tallinn, I'm happy to share what I have been working on. This blog is now also a teaser for what is yet to come, a book expected to be published in 2024!

The Tone of Voice within my Book and for Social Media

To help find my voice in AI to revise parts of my book and formulate my tone in social media posts, I asked ChatGPT to analyze a blog I am proud of and have written without AI. When analyzing 'Come as you are, do what you love, build the future you want' - Assalamu alaikum - Here I Am!', the following custom instructions came up. I still needed to get it into 1500 characters to fit the GPT instructions.

With my tone reflecting in the custom instructions, I am more confident to seem more authentic in my communications.

Learning about my Saba David and family story

When I was at the age of 12 my grandfather passed away. I have vivid memories of him and how he loved me and tried to communicate with me in Yiddish and German. As a child, I unfortunately didn't learn Hebrew but the similarities between Dutch, particularly Amsterdam Dutch and Yiddish are there, so were able to communicate. Growing up Jewish I was very aware of the atrocities that happened during the second world war. In 1998 my grandfather was interviewed by the Shoah Foundation to make a record of what happened and how he survived the war in Poland and Germany as the only survivor of his family.

As I still don't understand Hebrew that well but I did want to explore how he survived and how his family passed in the gas chambers. In 2017 I went to Poland with a Jewish youth organization 'The March of the Living'. This was a very heavy trip for me especially when I realized how hurt my grandfather must have been by seeing al the suffering, how this became generational through his upbringing of his children, and also how these horrifying events shaped my family, my mother, and me. I remember laying in bed after a long day in a communist-style hotel in Krakow after visiting Auschwitz and being on the phone with my uncle Yossi, talking about how Saba David survived. My uncle told me because he had the hope of having children and him thinking about having grandchildren. With me being the first-born grandchild I was surprised about my role in his life even far before I was born and while he was in these concentration camps.

I have very low trust in humanity as I see still today nothing has been learned. 'Never again' seems hollow words and that hurts me so much that I feel the need to speak up in my book about polarization and how we continue to live in a dangerous propaganda divide. If I feel hurt so bad now, while all of this happened almost a 100 years ago, you know what to expect what will happen with the children who are living in wars right now. This thought is haunting and made my cry already many times this week seeing the images of today's wars.

Today AI is opening doors for me to better understand my grandfather, my family history, and its context by being able to use video-to-Hebrew transcription and translating it to English. If you want to know, I will share my discoveries in my book. This is a summary of what I got out of one of the eight videos of my grandfather.

As I was working on this AI project, it didn't help to be crying all the time. I went through the text GPT generated but didn't read it in depth yet to prevent becoming an emotional wreck. I am planning to go back again to Poland to go to the places my grandfather mentions in his story while working on it. If you want to read more about being a third-generation holocaust survivor you can consider reading my earlier blog: 'Come as you are...' A third-generation holocaust survivor and why I stopped talking about racism.

Graphics and AI

One of my early passions in life was doing art. I am creative and at the age of 16 I received an offer to come study at Pixar in Los Angeles. Even with the financial grand promise, with my minimum youth wage of at the time around 5 euros per hour and my need to survive, I was not ever going to be able to save money to pay for housing and living in LA. I let go of this dream a just took drawing as my private time and then let it go because of lack of time and my priorities to take care of my family and my studies.

AI is now enabling me to pick up my creativity to illustrate my book. I didn't digitize my art but I did find this picture in the cloud, which I made when I was 17 when staying with my grandmother and Israel to give an impression of my day shopping and getting lost with public transport.

I asked GPT to extract a description of the drawing I made then and then apply it on the picture below of my mother in prison. Drawing humans is difficult and being a bit rusty with picking up my illustrative creativity this helps me to get started. This did not go as I liked that much..

Both Chat GPT refused to apply it to the picture of my mother being in prison. I tried it again with DALL-E.

I did a few more tries also with bing.com/create but am not that pleased yet with the results. I guess this is where my graphical experimentation and art will come in to make the illustrations meet my desired results.

If you want to know why my mother was in prison you can read my blog My Iboga Story. In my book, I will go into debt on all I know and have experienced with my mother's work, the war on drugs, and the oppressional system against holistic and natural health treatment.

More accessible language

In my book, I want to open up about my thoughts on becoming Muslim in the post-9/11 world. People frequently told me I lost my mind and still I get questions and remarks on the why and how. People just don't seem to understand that this decision has been voluntary. I cannot blame them for all the anti-Islam propaganda throwing fear and proposing people like me to be a threat to society by bringing Islamization to the West.

To make sure that my book will be accessible, I asked the GPT writing coach to add in bold context about the Islamic concepts to be more accessible for non-Muslim readers. Here is an example:

''As I immersed myself in Surat al-Baqarah, the 'Chapter of the Cow,' a profound realization dawned on me. The verses, profound and intricate, emerged as guides across life's vast expanse, the very guides I had yearned for in my journey. Growing up, I often felt adrift, lost in a maze without clear direction, struggling to even articulate my thirst for guidance. My Jewish heritage, though steeped in tradition, hadn't offered the intrinsic framework for life I desperately sought in my darkest hours.

Surat al-Baqarah, the longest chapter in the Quran, the holy book of Islam, resonated with me in a way that was both alien and deeply familiar. It was as if the surah was bridging gaps in my understanding of the world and my role within it. The verses stood like beacons, ushering me towards introspection, comprehension, and a path I had subconsciously longed for. The mention of Bani Israel, the Children of Israel, a term in the Quran referring to the Jewish people, struck a chord, bridging my past to this newfound spiritual exploration.

My engagement with the Quran, Islam's central religious text, regarded by Muslims as a revelation from God, transcended mere academic study; it was a pilgrimage of the soul. Each verse, meticulously pondered over, seemed to shine a light on the clarity and direction absent in my formative years and life's bleaker chapters. I was drawn irresistibly to the notion of divine guidance, navigators charting my course, making sense of the chaos that once engulfed me.

In the tranquility of that room, turning each page, a sense of belonging slowly took root within me. Here, in the embrace of Islamic teachings, the religious beliefs and practices of Islam, I discovered a blueprint for life, spiritual tools I had unknowingly longed for. It was an epiphany, connecting me to something far beyond myself – a realization that my quest for meaning and direction was finally molding into a form I had never anticipated.''

Also when I am writing about other deep concepts like Judaism, Dutch sub-culture, holistic treatment, and the matrix I ask for feedback to make my texts more accessible.

Thank you!

If this blog has sparked your curiosity and you like to join me in the journey of the book creation you can follow me. I am really still in the very start so expect not to see much on the following pages. If you rather not use social media you can fill in this form to get an update (at the most every other month).

LinkedIn:?https://www.dhirubhai.net/company/breaking-the-matrix/

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Youtube:?@BreakingTheMatrixStories ( in case you like me to read the stories to you)