Design Fiction x AI
About Ploy Pruekcharoen
Story 07
Theme: AI in Industries
When: 2040
Where: India
Narrative:
The year is 2040. The place is India. Our main character is visiting Mumbai to visit family on break. He is a middle school student from California. Everyone else is sleeping, but due to his jet lag, he’s wide awake. No one can disturb him - it’s a perfect time to get to work. He opens his computer and visits his social media page. He’s running an elaborate fantasy graphic novel, and he has thousands of followers online. Now that image generation is becoming more widely accepted and used, the market for illustrations and graphics is very oversaturated. But our character believes he can create something no one else can. However, he must keep working, and keep generating in order to keep up. Not all the illustrations and comics he generates are good, but he has an eye for the good ones. In this sense, he is more of a curator of ideas that come to him.
He opens the computer, but something is off. He first notices it in the English that the generator is creating, which sounds awkward to him. Next, he notices that the cartoon style he inputted is inspired more heavily by Japanese cartoons than the illustrative style he’s used to. He checks his location - of course. Now that he’s gone abroad, the generator has checked his location and is giving him different images. Each country and area has their own data set of biases and figures that make the most sense in that area. That is the only way people were able to accept and integrate AI generators into their home and work. Because the images made sense to them, it was only a short step from there to use it in more and more areas.
He closes the computer and tiptoes over the sleeping bodies to the kitchen, where he pours himself water from a pan of boiled water on the stove. He looks outside, where he has a view of a busy highway. It being so late at night, there was not that much traffic. The road, sidewalks and concrete railings were covered in stickers and paint. Every surface was bursting with advertisements, political posters, each more attention grabbing than the next. His parents, who are more used to the world 10 years ago, still stop and stare. But most passerby’s walked past with their heads down, not giving it any special attention.
He opens his computer again to watch a show. Choose your own adventure shows have become very popularized, first on YouTube, and now to all streaming services. The episode he was watching was intense, but he tended to get frustrated by the character choices on this show. He wished he could write a character through which he could just interrogate the suspect himself. At this point in the episode, the character John slips and drops a precious object, setting the plot back by a lot. Our character sighs, stops the episode, and goes into the character sheet for the show he’s watching. He finds the one for John, which describes him as a clumsy person. Our character edits the sheet, changing him to be more attentive. He waits while the AI regenerates the episode before watching again. Even still, the other characters in the show don’t seem to have a clue what the suspect’s motive is. Our character pauses the show and clicks on the suspect in the show. A chat interface shows up. Our character asks the suspect a series of questions, to which the suspect responds with the wittiness and spunk that she is capable of (our character knew that, it was on her character sheet). At first the suspect tries to dodge his questions, but our character succeeds in getting important information out of her. Finally, something entertaining. Now that the information is out there for the other characters to know, he waits for the AI to regenerate the episode before continuing.
News notifications pop up every now and then, but our character has gotten very good at ignoring them. There are more stories of people getting married to fictional characters. More stories about start-ups and companies skyrocketing to success, then failing. The top 50 most successful companies is a list that changes daily. With AI, it’s easier to do work, but now people are taking on twice the work they would have 10 years ago, and artists who are trying to stand out, like our main character, work even harder. There is no age barrier to who can become successful, but our main character wants to stand out early for his college applications, which have gotten as competitive as the rest of the working world. There are less marriages and babies being born than ever.