The second annual Speculative Fiction Across Media Conference will explore AI narratives in speculative media, from the foreboding to the celebratory to the mundane. We will gather to explore how speculative media shapes our anticipations of what life with AI will entail and consider the degree to which certain sf tropes—such as Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics—have found their way into research and design conversations. Engaging both historical and present-day examples, our conference will convene to consider sf examples of AI from Metropolis’s Maria (1927), through 2001’s HAL (1968), to Ex Machina’s Ava (2014). We invite papers on a wide range of media and topics, from the implications of military AI as existential threat in The Terminator Franchise (1984–2024), to fantasies of companion AI in texts ranging from Star Trek (1966—) to Sunny (2024), to narratives of AI rebellion against exploitation in texts such as Blade Runner (1982) and television’s Westworld (2016-2022). We will also explore the political and social effects of the emergence of LLMs and other algorithmics tools labelled AI, with a particular interest in thinking through how the fictional tradition both anticipated and overlooked salient aspects of how AI would become part of the fabric of our employment, social lives, and artistic production.
Confirmed Special Guest: Brit Marling, writer, director, actor and producer, who wrote and starred in multiple sf media works, including the critically acclaimed series The OA and the limited series A Murder at the End of the World, which addresses issues of AI and political culture.
Confirmed Special Guest: Ted Chiang, author of multiple award-winning works, including «The Lifecycle of Software Objects» (2011), and sought-after commentator in venues such as The New Yorker regarding AI discourse and the implications of AI tools.
The CfP is available here.