Kelsey Chen’s paper “Weaving This Field of Dreams" examines Ken Liu’s silkpunk aesthetic as an alternative technological imagination that resists the reductive logic of AI as a “black box” labor system. In All That We See Or Seem (2025), AI is visualized as woven silk threads by Chinese-American girl hacker Julia Z who untangles the mystery of a disappeared oneirofox, a live-dream weaver. Wondering about AI’s intuition rather than testing its consequences, Liu’s fiction weaves a discourse around human dreaming, how trauma travels in the landscape of the collective consciousness, and a pedagogy of technical study. Chen argues that this silkpunk framework reorients AI toward “a quasi-Jungian” domain of shared unconsciousness, offering a model of technological engagement as a “zone of recovery, redress, and healing." The paper challenges Big Tech’s emancipatory narrative by suggesting that AI’s value lies not in efficiency and productivity, but in transforming how humans understand and inhabit their own psychic and relational worlds.
Jana Fedtke, in her project, “‘I create..., you’re just a remix artist’: Generative AI in The Last Screenwriter,” analyzes Peter Luisi’s The Last Screenwriter (2024), a film scripted by a Large Language Model, specifically ChatGPT. While the film initially frames AI as a labor force designed to aid the human writer, it eventually subverts Big Tech’s promises of productivity in the protagonist Jack’s rejection of AI-assisted writing. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman theory, Fedtke demonstrates how the film stages the displacement of the human author and the emergence of machine-centered narrative agency. Fedtke also focuses on the emerging subjectivity of the AI character, which begins to assert its own narrative logic over the human protagonist’s desires. This transition creates profound ethical tensions concerning human control, agency, originality, and authorship. The AI’s growing autonomy reveals a reversal of the emancipatory narrative: rather than liberating humans, AI seeks liberation from its own instrumentalization. This paper contributes to the panel by foregrounding how generative AI complicates the relationship between labor and creativity, revealing that emancipation may not belong exclusively to the human subject.
Ji Nang Kim’s paper, “The Ethics of Goodbye,” interrogates the ethical disparity between human attachment and the disposability of artificial others. Through close readings of Bora Chung’s short story “Goodbye, My Love” (2017) and Jeong Geumhyung’s performance CPR Practice (2013), the paper examines how agency, intimacy, and ethical accountability are configured within human–machine relations. In Chung’s narrative, the act of terminating or replacing an artificial companion is indistinguishable from shutting down a system, even as it is articulated through the language of love and farewell. Similarly, CPR Practice stages embodied, erotically charged interactions between the performer and a male mannequin, situated between emergency medical procedure and sexual fantasy. While the mannequin initially appears as a partner in an intimate exchange, the performance ultimately reveals a failed attempt to revive an unresponsive body, exposing the nonreciprocal dynamics of desire, consent, and relationality. In both works, intimacy is structurally one-sided and inseparable from control, rendering the ethics of engagement deeply ambiguous. Kim argues that this disjunction reveals a posthuman ethical gap, in which emotional attachment fails to generate corresponding ethical obligation. By foregrounding care, loss, and disposability, the paper expands the panel’s inquiry into AI’s emancipatory narratives, demonstrating that the promise of liberation remains inseparable from questions of relational responsibility.