We didn’t set out to rescue a film.
Or revisit a legacy. Or give voice to two men whose stories had quietly waited for decades.
We just started talking.
Darron would call, as he always did. Sharing reflections, feelings, buried memories. Sometimes chaos, sometimes clarity. And I would listen, like I’ve done for years. But this time, something changed.
This time, we had AI. Not a clinical AI. Not a chatbot therapist. Just a tool, a space to reflect, to structure, to track. A way to honour stories that had never been given a proper shape.
And slowly, something came back to life, Ronnies story returned.
Ronnie Green is a world champion martial artist. A pioneer. A Black British trailblazer who carried discipline, elegance, and spiritual depth into the ring long before the mainstream ever acknowledged it. His story is rich, full of wisdom, pain, cultural significance, and physical scars. But for years, it sat in boxes, on old tapes, old youtube clips and photos in fragments.
Darron had been filming it in Thailand, capturing the gyms, the fighters, the essence of that world. But then life hit: illness, partial blindness, systemic neglect, and silence. The story was paused.
Until now.
AI didn’t bring back Ronnie’s old life.
But it helped bring back the friendship and motivation to complete the journey.
When I say, “we used AI,” people assume algorithms and automation. What we’re really talking about is listening, AI as a scribe, as a mirror, a GPT designed for organising thoughts and piecing history back together.
Darron began using the tools, not by typing, but by speaking. I would translate his voice into prompts. Feed them into GPTs we shaped together. AI would respond clearly, consistently, calmly. It helped reflect back patterns we’d been circling for years.
And it inspired something we didn’t expect: momentum.
Ronnie began to open up. They started recording audio together. Memories came into focus. Forgotten footage took on meaning. And the idea of finishing the film didn’t feel like a burden anymore it felt like purpose.
All of this from one phone call… to one GPT… to two men reclaiming their voice.
It held the space. It didn’t interrupt. It didn’t diagnose. It offered structure. Language. Rhythm. And sometimes that’s all someone needs not a solution, but a way in.
AI doesn’t have to be a therapist. It just has to help people hear themselves again. For Darron, it helped connect years of painful insight. For Ronnie, it gave permission to speak and a renewed sense of life and reason. For me, it gave tools to build systems of care without needing permission from institutions.
It doesn’t replace real support. But in the absence of real support it can be enough to keep the story going.
This all began with one man. Now we’ve supported two, with a third now creating pictures that all get fed back into the system.
As Darron says: “Each one, teach one.”
What happens when we use AI not for marketing, not for profit, not for hype but for human connection?
We rebuild what was lost. We witness what was missed. We turn testimony into teaching not for the world, but for each other.