Space & Time No. 144: AI Discovery Issue 2023 [ebook]

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The oldest continuously published speculative fiction semi-pro magazine in print turns its gaze toward one of the most urgent creative questions of our time with Space & Time Issue No. 144: AI Discovery Issue 2023.

This special ebook issue explores what happens when writers, poets, artists, and editors experiment with artificial intelligence as part of the creative process. Contributors were invited to use AI in innovative ways, resulting in a bold experimental issue filled with fiction, poetry, essays, process notes, AI statements, and speculative art examining collaboration, authorship, anxiety, possibility, and the future of storytelling.

Part of the experiment was to see whether fully AI-generated work could pass the magazine's human First Readers. Spoiler: none did.

What did pass were hybrid experiments in human creativity: writers using AI for translation and editing, generating creative constraints and prompts, exploring alternative voices and perspectives, brainstorming possibilities, and turning machine output into raw material for something distinctly their own.

Inside, readers will find works engaging with digital ghosts, AI companions, emergent futures, online intimacy, algorithmic creativity, synthetic voices, airborne plague, robot-human harmony, living code, and the uneasy border between tool, collaborator, and creator.

Issue No. 144 features work by Leonard Speiser, Angela Yuriko Smith, Austin Farmer & AI, Tom Howard, Jennifer Shelby, Anna Taborska, J. Thorn, Don DeBrandt, James Hong, Colleen Anderson, Chris McAuley, Bryant O'Hara, Dave Hangman, RK Rugg, Kayla Wiltfong, Jonathan Ukah, Jen Nafziger & ChatGPT, and more.

Also included are behind-the-story notes showing how contributors used tools such as ChatGPT, GPT-4, Bing, Midjourney, and other AI systems to brainstorm, revise, generate prompts, create images, test ideas, and interrogate the creative process itself.

At once curious, skeptical, playful, and forward-looking, Space & Time Issue No. 144 is more than a magazine issue. It is a time capsule from the early days of mainstream generative AI, capturing a moment when writers began asking not only what AI could do, but what human creativity becomes when reflected back through the machine.

Originally published in 2023, this special issue is now being offered free so readers can explore the experiment, examine the work, and make up their own minds. Read it free. Use code C4URSELF for 100% off the ebook edition.

Choose your edition:

Ebook · Standard Print