Workshop @ ICCC ’23 Conference: Fictional Abstracts: Ethics, Sustainability, and Creative-AI Futures

Date & time

Monday June 19 9AM – 4PM, on-site at the ICCC conference in Waterloo, Canada

Description of the Workshop 

There has been an increasing interest in discussing implications of technologies for computational creativity in terms of ethics and sustainability. This workshop brings such questions into focus in the specific context of Creative-AI systems by exploring questions of ethics and sustainability through the use of Fictional Abstracts. We use Fictional Abstracts to cast forward 15 years to 2038 to imagine the future of Creative-AI, and reflect on how we got there. By writing Fictional Abstracts – abstracts of research papers yet to be written – we will unpick critical tensions in the advancement of computational creativity over the next decades. The workshop invites participants to develop perspectives and sensitivities on the futures of AI-enabled computational creativity and to critically reflect on the assumptions, methods, and tools for enabling (and disabling) such futures, with a particular focus on questions of ethics and sustainability. 

Keywords 

Knowledge, design fiction, fictional abstracts, ethics, sustainability

Call for Participation 

Speculative Abstracts submissions should meet the following requirements:

  • Abstracts should aim for triggering critical discussion and reflection.
  • Abstracts should contain a Title, Authors, Keywords, Abstract text, and optional References and adhere to an approximate length of a regular abstract (200-300 words).
  • Submitted via email to organizers.
  • PDF file formatted according to the this template.
  • Instructions/guidelines for formulating and writing speculative abstracts can be found here.
  • Participants are required to attend the workshop in person.

Preliminary Important Dates

  • Submissions due: May 5, 2023
  • Acceptance notification: May 15, 2023
  • Workshop: June 19, 2023

Note: Selected fictional abstracts may be published in papers resulting from the workshops. By signing up and applying to the workshop, participants agree that the data produced during the workshop may be used to inform a future publication on the Speculative News Articles Method.

Organizers (and Organizing Committee) 

Petra Jääskeläinen, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden Camilo Sanchez, Aalto University, Finland
Daniel Pargman, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Elina Eriksson, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Minna-Laurell Thorslund, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden