Speculative Fiction Across Media 2025 – Artificial Intelligence: Fantasies, Realities, Futures
September 25-27, 2025
Courtyard Marriott Monterey Park, Los Angeles
The second annual Speculative Fiction Across Media Conference will explore AI narratives in speculative media, from the foreboding, through the mundane, to the celebratory. We will explore how speculative media shapes our anticipations of a world in which we live with and use AI 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.
The conference will feature special guests:
Gale Anne Hurd: a multi-award-winning producer—and the founder of Valhalla Entertainment—whose producing credits include the original Terminator film, which she co-wrote.
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.
Engaging both historical and present-day examples, our conference will convene to consider sf examples of AI throughout the genre’s history as well as the ways in which real-world AI research draws from sf tropes. We are interested in papers that consider images of disembodied AI, those addressing robots and similar artificial beings, and papers that interrogate how the emergence of generative AI, large-language learning models, and algorithmic tools change the fabric of our social lives, our employment, and our modes of artistic production. We invite papers on a wide range of media and topics and encourage submissions that consider the intersections of AI and speculative imaginaries from multiple disciplinary and methodological perspectives.
Proposals of 250-300 words should be sent as PDF attachments to Sherryl Vint (sherryl.vint@gmail.com) by May 16, 2025. Proposals for individual papers, pre-constituted paper panels, and roundtable discussion panels are all welcome. Please ensure the names and contact details for each proposed participant are included in the proposal.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- The legacy of significant AI figures on popular culture, such as Isaac Asimov’s robots, Philip K. Dick’s androids, cyberpunk’s AI networks, or military AI systems such as Skynet
- AI and robots as figurations of gender, race and class hierarchies, whether as sympathetic depictions of exploitation or as emblems of threat to humanity
- Alternative perspectives on AI technologies and the ethics of design in work by Indigenous, Latinx, feminist, nonbinary, Black and other creators
- The politics of Silicon Valley and other corporate AI imaginaries globally and their influence on contemporary culture
- Works of sf that critique practices of AI in contemporary culture, from algorithmic data processing, to gig-economy labour and pricing, to AI-produced creative works, and more
- Historical analyses addressing how and why our imaginary of AI has changed over time both within and beyond genre sf
- Theoretical interrogations of how representations of AI intersect with posthumanism, disability studies, studies of media ecologies, and more
- Analyses of works of art produced in whole or part by AI systems
For more details on the venue and the guests, please see our website.