“I want to build something”. A field study of pioneering communities, feminist speculation and Creative AI.

This field study brings together notions of pioneering communities which operate on an everyday level of technological change with a microsociological view and praxeological methods to describe feminist speculation in regard to Creative AI. By presenting a field study of a female group with ties to maker and hacker culture, this paper demonstrates how communities with the support of AI-tools shape and influence socio-technical narratives: with speculations about alternative AI worlds as critical counter narratives to present-day eschatological AI discourse. While an existing body of work with a speculative agenda has highlighted speculation as ways of knowing, this paper presents arguments to regard ways of doing speculation. The discussion of the field study then presents four practices (self-organization, prototyping, empowerment and worlding) that can be used to illustrate doing speculation. This paper thereby offers three contributions. First, the field study offers researchers insights into a “nexus of doings and sayings” of a feminist pioneering community in regard to Creative AI. Second, the field study illustrates how feminist speculations can move from ways of knowing into practices of doing. And last, this paper shines a light on how speculative practices of Creative AI offer communities a practice of worlding and empowerment.