Speculative Fiction for Interdisciplinary, Proactive, and Publicly Engaged AI Ethics

Given the rapid development of AI technologies, it is crucial to proactively mitigate their potential ethical harms. In this work, we apply interdisciplinary futuring tactics such as speculative fiction to elucidate potentially unforeseen consequences of future AI technologies. While speculative fiction has been applied in HCI as a participatory design method, our research advocates for advancing beyond a strictly participatory role for writers and to instead include them as expert collaborators. We engage in collaborative autoethnography (CAE) as creative writers with STEM backgrounds to reflect on experiences in our AI ethics community-based speculative fiction workshop series and on our perspectives on collaboration between technologists and writers. This paper contributes: (1) our method for community-based speculative fiction including writer workshops, a website, and print anthology, (2) our argument for why writers should be expert collaborators in HCI and (3) our guidelines for interdisciplinary collaboration between writers and technologists for proactive AI ethics.