Stanley Chen, a science fiction author who co-wrote AI 2041 with Google China's CEO, describes his hybrid writing process where he uses LLMs as essential tools but rewrites every line they generate, believing current models are insufficient as both writers and literary judges. The interview explores his practical experience with different LLM models for fiction writing, including their strengths with language-specific features like Chinese punctuation, and his philosophy of using AI as a collaborative partner rather than a substitute for human creativity.
This issue features worldbuilding analysis of the AI-generated film South Beast Asia, examining ten core traits designed to explore distributed AI systems through a Southeast Asian-inspired lens developed at the Khlongs & Subaks workshop. The piece unpacks how fictional 'strange rules' address questions of AI distribution while the issue also hosts a guest talk with AI Snake Oil author Arvind Sarayanan.
Sam Chua
Botao Amber Hu presents 'Protocoling HCI,' an early-stage design theory arguing that HCI must shift from designing moments of use to designing protocols as infrastructural material that shapes local action spaces while enabling emergent collective behavior. Drawing on Michael Levine's work on agential material, bioelectric morphogenesis, and 'cognitive glue,' plus concepts like emergent engineering and reverse game theory, Hu proposes that protocols act as 'trust compressors' that let bounded agents coordinate without full mutual knowledge, illustrated through the NFT art piece Merge as a 'protocol art' example.
Botao Amber Hu
Sean Stevenson argues that AI is undergoing a 'descent' through Stewart Brand's pace layers—moving from fast fashion/commerce layers down through governance and culture toward nature itself—becoming less dramatic and less contestable as it sinks, following a pattern he traces via Clayton Christensen's theory of attractive profits migrating to the least-optimized layer of a value chain. He proposes a four-stage model (integrate, coordinate, embed, inherit) for this descent and introduces 'appeal foreclosure' versus 'ossification' as a way to distinguish genuine new nature from captured systems, while drawing on Spinoza's natura naturans/naturata and Philippe Descola's ontological framework (naturalism, animism, totemism, analogism) to speculate how AI-plus-protocols might shift human categories of inner life and matter.
Sean Stevenson