AI as a Citizen: Eliciting Smart City Future Stories through Human-AI Collaborative Fiction Writing

Smart cities are becoming an inevitable trend in the design of urban futures. With the speed of technological advancement, by the time that smart city visions come to life, the urban environment could already be seen as a co-living space of humans and technological entities, such as Artificial Intelligence. This raises the question of whether these future visions should get already co-created by both people and technology, especially given AI’s potential role as a decision-making agent in data-driven smart city visions (e.g. urban planning). In this workshop, we aim to explore how visions of smart city futures can be co-speculated by people and AI through the collaborative process of writing fiction. Through writing short speculative stories, we want to encourage participants to critically reflect on their own expectations about smart city futures, as well as on what values these should preferably be based on. Moreover, we will analyze and discuss the future narratives and potential biases that AI might bring into the process of futuring.