“Infinity Book”: Critical Speculation on How Generative AI Shapes the Socio-Material World

Recent advancements in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and its promising impact on shaping human computer co-creativity relationships have attracted speculation on this issue. Despite a call for more design-oriented research and many works using critical and speculative design to understand the socio-technical implications of GenAI, few of them have made design artifacts for a more concrete examination. As a response, we carried out three speculative design workshops to explore this issue by introducing a speculative concept named Infinity Book, a system creating any kind of fictional text from minimal user input. The data collected from the workshops was analyzed through reflective thematic analysis. The results pointed out the double-edged role of GenAI in extending human capabilities while highlighting ethical issues such as cultural decay and social fragmentation. We also reported our preliminary insights into the relationship between human and nonhuman actants shaped by GenAI under the theoretical background of Actor-Network Theory and Postphenomenology.