Disturbing images of what the near future of Nigeria may look like if citizens don’t make the right electoral choices have been depicted by an artificially intelligent (AI) image generator.

One of the images features a dilapidated Nigerian local street road in 2050. Another shows a Nigerian local street at night in 2070 covered in darkness due to a power outage. The disturbing images are not desirable for the kind of country many young Nigerians would want the country to look like in the future.

Neusroom, an online news and media platform, owned by Info Digital Africa Limited (ID Africa), on Wednesday, February 22, 2023, unveiled the results of the predictions as part of a voters’ awareness and sensitisation campaign targeting young people whose future would be most affected by the outcome of the 2023 elections.

The campaign, with the creative support of X3M Ideas, one of Africa’s leading full-service marketing communications agencies, aims to galvanise national awareness to increase the number of young voters in the upcoming general elections.

“As a socially conscious media platform, Neusroom has partnered with X3M Ideas on this voter education and awareness campaign to hopefully inspire Nigeria’s young population to civic action,” Michael Orodare, Editorial Lead at Neusroom said. “It is not enough to have the right to vote as a registered voter, what is more important is to utilise the right to bring reform into government by choosing leaders who will deliver a working future for all.”

Mid Journey, an image-generating Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform was deployed to paint a picture of what Nigeria would look like in the near future. The results returned by the platform were disturbing and undesirable for the kind of country many young Nigerians would want the country to look like in the future.

Images generated by the AI platform will be used for awareness messages across online platforms and on billboards in different parts of Lagos, Nigeria.

“These results were from the AI platform’s assessment of our past and present,” Mike Miller, Executive Creative Director, X3M Ideas said. “We told Mid Journey (An image-generating AI platform) to show us what Nigeria would look like in the nearest future and the results we got were not desirable of the kind of country we want Nigeria to be in the future.”

In a country where the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) says 63% (133 million) residents are multidimensionally poor and 33.3% (23.18 million people) are jobless, while 73% of Nigerians were looking to emigrate with their families in 2021, according to the Africa Polling Institute (API), the awareness campaign is targeted at young electorates (18-34) who make up 39.65% (37 million) of the 93.4 million registered voters and have been victims of Nigeria’s rising unemployment and police brutality.

Neusroom and X3M Ideas said they hope that young Nigerians can prove the AI results wrong by going out to vote for leaders that will transform the country and create the desired future.