Speculating AI Futures

Team: Richard Zhang, Lauren Lin

We are engaging in speculative design to explore possibilities for what our interactions with creative AI technologies could look like in the future and consider ethical and societal implications. As emerging AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E are changing the landscape of AI creativity, we are asking questions about what these technologies could look like decades into the future. Could we interact with these tools in a way that is more consistent with traditional artistic practice? How might we reckon with the environmental impact of large language models? What impacts could these tools have on creatives and communities in the future? 

Our aims extend into thinking specifically about modes of speculating AI futures, and drawing on humanistic work to understand how speculation operates. Some of our work proposes defamiliarization, borrowed from Russian literary formalism, as a way of thinking through how making designs strange and unfamiliar has the effect of renewing understandings of reality. Our past and current projects work about defamiliarization as a framework for new ways of designing and comprehending AI systems, through creation of strange AI conversational assistants as well as through written fictional memos, abstracts, and narratives called design fictions. 

Lin, L., & Long, D. (2023, June). Generative AI Futures: A Speculative Design Exploration. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Creativity and Cognition (pp. 380-383).

Zhang, R., & Long, D. (2025, January). Beyond Content: Leaning on the Poetics of Defamiliarization in Design Fictions. In Companion Proceedings of the 2025 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP ‘25)