Design Fiction x AI
About Ploy Pruekcharoen
Story 01
Theme: AI in Health and Well-Being
When: 2040
Where: The bedroom of a teenage girl in India, in a Utopian world.
Why: Bringing creative visions to life through AI image generation.
Narrative:
While there are countless things that can go wrong with AI image generation in the future, including some highly alarming possibilities, I’m using this space to focus on one of the positives.
I’m imagining a teenager in a middle-class family in India, someone who is struggling to cope with her reality. She feels alone, and often immerses herself in her imaginary world. She has tried to capture her feelings in her old-school handwritten journal, but mere words won’t seem to do it.
She thinks in color and imagery, and no language seems to encapsulate how she feels. She has tried painting, but it only leaves her frustrated. Every painting appears childish, shallow, and lacking the emotions of her world. She has enrolled in painting classes, but it would be years before she could translate the images in her head to images in paper. So, instead, she turns to AI.
She switches on her neural chip (non-invasive electrodes maybe?) and connects to the image generator on her iPhone through 10G. She closes her eyes and sinks into her imaginary world. Her room comes alive in her mind - it’s full of plants and mushrooms. Sunlight streams in through light catchers and pours color into her room. She has an expensive, fuzzy rug on the floor, where her imaginary cat rolls over onto his belly. Her father would never allow her to have such whimsical decor in the real world, let alone a cat.
The teenager opens her eyes to 8 beautiful illustration-style paintings of her bedroom, with her in the middle, playing with her cat. They’re just like she had imagined.
She then pulls out her vintage portable printer and prints out her favorite. She glues the image into her journal, and begins writing around it, fleshing out how she feels about it.
For those few moments, she is at peace.