Ai’s Role In Imagining Future Life-Worlds That Motivate Young Citizens To Participate In Climate Action

Shared future imaginaries are acknowledged to be important drivers of societal innovation and transformation to mitigate the climate crisis. Particularly, positive far-future life-world imaginaries have been found essential for overcoming eco-anxiety amongst young people. Scholars have begun to examine the role generative AI (such as large-language models) might play to create such new narratives. However, the evidence is currently inconclusive as to whether AI helps or hinders the process of imagining future life-worlds that can be used to motivate young citizens to participate in societal innovation and transformation to mitigate climate change. This paper presents a study that has collected, analyzed and compared human- and AI-generated far-future climate short stories by 78 young Danish citizens. The findings advance our understanding of how AI-generated differ from human-generated climate futures in content, structure and mobilization potential for societal innovation.