• AI Future Day
• What Works Well?
• What Works…Less Well?
• Opportunities
• What’s Adaptable?
• Coming Attractions

This week, our Free Culture Book Club starts reading AI Future Day…assuming that the author actually calls it that.

To give this series some sense of organization, check out some basic facts without much in the way of context.

• Full Title: AI Future Day
• Location: https://www.osugisakae.com/blog/ai-future-day-05.html
• Released: 2023 – 2024
• License: CC BY-SA
• Creator: Chris Spackman
• Medium: Novella
• Length: Approximately twenty-one thousand words
• Content Advisories: Profuse coarse language, possible racism, superficial talk about slavery, AI boosterism

This should go without saying—even though I plan to repeat it with every Book Club installment—but Content Advisories do not suggest any sort of judgment on my part, only topics that come up in the work that I noticed and might benefit from a particular mood or head space for certain audiences. I provide it to help you make a decision, rather than a decision in and of itself.

AI Future Day🔗

I can’t find much about the story except repeated references to it on the main page as…

…the “future of AI in school” science-fiction short story.

Beyond that, you know what I know. However, I suppose that this brief summary gives us some idea of the shape of things, since we’ve all started living in that world.

What Works Well?🔗

Given the similar feel of the technology, I don’t think that it really comes together in the way that it wants, but I at least need to give the story some credit for trying to provoke discussion around how, if actual artificial intelligence existed, then we would need to answer questions about how to treat it.

What Works…Less Well?🔗

What do we mean by less well? Free Culture exists as a special kind of idea. By licensing a work appropriately, the creator gives each of us permission, authority, and power to make the work our own. This section tries to remind us all of that, by indicating areas of the project where you, dear reader, might consider it as an invitation to get involved with the project. And yes, sometimes complaints slip through, too…

After the objection to racism in the earlier half, it seems like a huge problem to frame a person with a traditionally Muslim name having a side conversation inspired by the protagonist’s own side conversation as “interrupting.” I don’t know about the rest of you, but at least in my corner of the world, once you disengage from a group, you no longer have the floor. Plus, in cramming in a reference to Jefferson Davis, the protagonist makes the point that “Ohio was part of the Union,” phrasing that perpetuates the fiction that the United States government didn’t have legitimacy during the American Civil War, rather than it putting down a rebellion intended to maintain and expand a regime of chattel slavery.

The story shows a shocking lack of speculation, for a speculative story about the distant future. For the big example, the game or lesson about faked historical images revolves around generic “tells” relevant to the past few years, as if image generation will never figure out fingers and text.

And while people might have different tastes for this sort of thing, I find it consistent with how poorly the writing distinguishes the character that the protagonist never gets a name. We know nothing about her—they finally identify her as female—family, and the apparently good and important family’s restaurant doesn’t rate a name, either.

Opportunities🔗

I don’t see any interest in support or engagement, though the author has written quite a few other things.

What’s Adaptable?🔗

I didn’t notice anything new in this section.

Coming Attractions🔗

Next week, we’ll read Steamboat Sailor Brawl, a comic that (almost?) proves me wrong.

As mentioned previously, by the way, the list of potential works to discuss has run low, so I need to ask for help, again. If you know of any works that fit these posts—fictional, contains some narrative, Free Culture, available to the public, and not by creators who we’ve already discussed—please tell me about them. Every person who points me to at least one appropriate work with an explanation will receive a free membership on my Buy Me a Coffee page. (By all means, promote your own work if relevant, or create something under an appropriate license for the purpose of promoting your own work.)

Anyway, while we wait for that, what did everybody else think about the story so far?

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Credits: The header image is Keep in touch by Gauthier 郭天 Delecroix, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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