Overview

AI Yesterday is a digital zine that challenges dominant narratives about AI’s potential futures. Historically, zines help make the communities that create them. The AI Yesterday community will integrate academics, artists, technology practitioners and communities of users. Our methods call for wider literary and creative participation within a supportive environment, providing a space for a  community to grow with an ongoing, embedded peer support system. Through this collaboration, joining disparate groups that work on or are affected by the same technology, new visions for AI research, practice and use will emerge.

The AI Yesterday team aims to reimagine tech through its integration of experimental content and methods. AI Yesterday engages with histories of AI, up to and including yesterday. Its focus on the past avoids AI imaginaries or generative promises. Thematic issues cover topics visible in academic discourse that remain bound by the parameters of scholarly practice including. Topics for issues include Hype, Fails, Absurdity and Labour. Blending salient content with experimental methods allows narratives surrounding AI to be reframed and re-examined through intersectional inclusivity. AI Yesterday is inclusive not just in incorporating a range of participants: academics, artists, practitioners, community members, and AI itself (through NLP) but in its methods, which afford accessibility to community members and allow academics and practitioners to leave rigid formats and deliverables of their disciplines behind.

AI yesterday is a co-created, multi-institution project among partners that sit across academia and technology practice. This project will expand AI Yesterday’s community and networks as we develop subsequent issues. This will include leading interactive workshops that feed into future zine issues, as well as a panel discussion and interviews that will build extend the material that is co-created through workshops and in the zine. We also plan to make AI itself a contributor. A GPT3 NLP-enabled bot will critically engage with the AI Yesterday community, making AI become both our central focus and an engaged participant, providing even more material for the broader community to reflect upon.