Creativity and Imaginary Panel
Among the most innovative strands of the SIpEIA 2026 conference is the one that explores the relationships between artificial intelligence, the imaginary, and creativity. At its core, this line of inquiry seeks to understand how we talk about AI and how AI talks about us—that is, how it represents the world. In a 2023 article entitled Poetry Will Not Optimize; or, What Is Literature to AI?, Michele Elam highlighted the importance of the imaginary in our society and, consequently, the need to pay close attention to the interaction between AI and narratives. In a world where everything is storytelling, the forms and contents of narratives take on major political, economic, and cultural significance, shaping our ideas and molding our ways of thinking. For this reason, investigating how AI enters the collective imaginary and how it acts within it through the generation of new narratives becomes an essential component of AI ethics.
The contributions within the “Creativity and Imaginary” strand of the SIpEIA 2026 conference aim to untangle these issues analytically, through close and careful observation of the cultural and communicative phenomena that emerge and develop in contact with artificial intelligence systems. On the creative side, for example, we will see how artists who use AI in their work often engage in a dialectical confrontation with these systems, using the creative process both as a testing ground for AI and as a space for counter-narratives. Several contributions show how the interaction between human creativity and artificial narratives generates a productive clash that exposes representational flaws in these systems—which, ultimately, are also our own. Another crucial issue that will be addressed is the need to integrate the notion of ambiguity into AI systems, a central element of human thought. At the same time, the panel will examine how AI is contributing to artistic practices, with examples drawn from cinema, television series, poetry, and literature: a genuine new wave of creative experimentation revolving around AI’s generative capabilities.
On the other side, the panel will explore the ways in which AI is currently narrated by us. This is a fundamental step, since public perception, levels of acceptance, and the possibility of building genuine awareness all depend on the type of narrative being produced. The contributions in the “Creativity and Imaginary” strand seek to deconstruct stereotypical narratives about AI, attempting to dismantle the polarization between enthusiasts and doomsayers—an outcome of historically rooted but flawed interpretations. On the one hand, there is the oracular view of technology, according to which data represent absolute truths; on the other, there is the myth of machine rebellion. Looking more closely, the former has been challenged by data ethics, which shows that data are not neutral representations of the world but instead embody the perspective and positioning of those who select them. The latter, meanwhile, is clearly a literary trope belonging to the genre of science fiction and has little to do with the real developments in AI that we are currently experiencing.
Imaginary and creativity thus emerge as indispensable testing grounds for AI ethics, helping to reconstruct a more nuanced and truthful representation of these technologies. Narrating—and being narrated by—artificial intelligence in an accurate way is the first step toward engaging with it with the awareness necessary to ensure accuracy and equality.