A newspaper from an AI future — a Design Fiction artifact that imagines a world where artificial intelligence is mundane, woven seamlessly into the fabric of everyday life. We used this as one of the prompts/provocations leading into a two-day workshop on AI policy and strategy. Through the newspaper we explored the implications of AI futures through speculative narratives and future artifacts.

Each piece of content in the newspaper represents a material cultural component of the world, based on current trends as well as speculations about the multiple directionalities and implications of AI futures.

Topics covered include AI-enabled spiritual and psychic rituals, Digital Twins (‘Digitwins’ for short in-world), AI-enabled companion species, AI-enabled emotional support intelligences (ESIs), home appliances, toys, sports as AI-backed simulations, crime ('prompt front-running’), entertainment (generative films, generative music, the future of the record 'album'), and more.

This was created as a speculative design fiction project, this newspaper served as a way to explore, develop, and dive deep into the implications of AI in society. It is not a means of prediction or prognostication; rather it is a way to provoke thought and discussion about the future of AI and its implications for society, governance, and policy.

The newspaper is a collection of articles, stories, and images that explore the future of AI in society, governance, and policy. It is a way to engage with the future in a tangible and accessible way, to spark conversations and debates about the future of AI and its implications for society, governance, and policy.

I created the newspaper in a short, about two-week sprint to help prepare myself for a workshop, and ended up serving as a productive bit of stimulus material for the workshop itself.

This was a proper heads-down sprint in the studio. Alex was alongside of it as we had been having regular weekly calls, so I had good encouragement. But truth be told, I found hunkering into the work solo to be more to my general liking particularly given the too-tight self-imposed deadling to have something done in time for the London Workshop. In this case, I had to do all of the design, layout and illustrations in collaboration with various AI image makers. COming up with story/article ideas benefited from the rich interlinked world of prognosticators, industry leaders, speculators, doubters/doomers in the podcast, blog, and journalism space. This was effectively me ideating the article/story concepts based somewhat on a special gift I seem to have of an active imagination connected to my engineering and humanities sensibilities. (I keep a repository of concepts in a database as they occur to me in any case just for projects like this, or actual software/development concepts). I found that, like with TBD Catalog, imagining, extending, and extrapolating from current trends in AI happens suddenly for me. So, I wrote the articles and advertisements and just got to work grinding these out. I also did the layout and design of the newspaper, and managed the production of the physical copies. (That was a bit of a thing as I kept wanting to add concepts in the form of articles for so I'm wrestling with InDesign — which is a bear with its consistent spinning beachball even on M1 chips, SSDs and all the rest), and given the mechanics of print production, I have to add 4 pages to get one new page. So, that's generative and cool, but also..lots of action. Fortunately my printer got the job done and delivered to the venue a week before the start of the event, when really the best I could have hoped for was one day before the event. Super service.)