Introduction

Artificial intelligence has entered public life with unusual speed and ambiguity. It appears at once as tool, collaborator, competitor, companion, mirror, and threat. It promises to extend human capability while raising questions about what forms of capability we most value. It can draft, translate, summarize, classify, recommend, imitate, persuade, and, increasingly, act. It can amplify creativity, labor, and discovery; it can also distort truth, unsettle work, manipulate attention, simulate intimacy, and blur the boundary between human judgment and machine output. We are living through a moment in which AI is no longer merely a technical achievement or a speculative possibility. It has become a cultural condition.

This issue of Dædalus begins from the conviction that such a moment cannot be understood by technical analysis alone. AI is built from mathematics, data, computation, engineering, and design, but it is also made meaningful through stories: the stories its developers tell about progress, the stories its critics tell about danger, the stories users tell about usefulness or dependence, and the stories societies tell about intelligence, agency, labor, creativity, and personhood.

Imaginative literature has long provided a vocabulary for confronting technologies before they are fully understood. It gives form to anticipation. It allows us to ask not only what a technology can do, but what it may do to the texture of human experience. For this issue, we invited fiction writers to imagine futures, near futures, and our current era shaped by artificial intelligence. We asked them to treat AI as a force entering households, workplaces, memories, friendships, creative practices, and private lives. The resulting stories explore machines that console, deceive, remember, desire, compete, assist, replace, and demand recognition. They ask what happens when AI becomes persuasive enough to be mistaken for care, competent enough to rival expertise, intimate enough to receive confession, and autonomous enough to appear to be making its own rules.

But there are some twists to these games. We wanted to do more than publish fiction about AI. Each story in this issue is accompanied by a response from a scholar, scientist, engineer, or thinker working close to the technical, social, philosophical, or historical questions the story raises. These responses do not reduce the fiction to explanation. Rather, they place the imaginative work in dialogue with the present state of AI: what is already possible, what is being exaggerated, what is newly plausible, and what remains fundamentally uncertain. The pairing creates a double lens. Fiction opens a space of possibility; technical and critical reflection tests that possibility against the world we are building. 

This structure reflects our own collaboration as coeditors. We come to the subject from different disciplines: one of us (Rus) from computer science, AI, and robotics, the other (Scott) from creative writing. That difference is central to the issue’s purpose. AI is too consequential to be left to any single field. Engineers can tell us what systems can be made to do, but fiction writers can show us how such systems might feel when they enter a life. Technical experts can clarify the capacities and limits of current AI, but imaginative narrative can reveal the desires, fears, dependencies, and moral evasions that gather around those capacities. Together, these modes of thinking help us confront not only the technology itself, but the human choices that surround it.

The timing matters. Recent advances in generative and agentic AI have made old questions newly urgent. What counts as intelligence when machines can imitate conversation, style, emotion, and expertise? What happens to authorship when a system can generate convincing language or images from a prompt? What becomes of trust when identity can be simulated and memory revised? How should we understand agency when AI systems can act on our behalf? And what obligations do we have when the systems we create begin to mediate not only information but companionship, art, education, medicine, labor, and political life?

These are not simply questions about machines. They are questions about us: about the kinds of relationships we seek, the kinds of work we honor, the kinds of creativity we recognize, and the kinds of futures we are willing to imagine. The stories and responses gathered here do not offer a single verdict on AI. They resist both utopian celebration and apocalyptic certainty. Instead, they invite readers into a more difficult and more necessary space: one in which hope and unease coexist, technological possibility is inseparable from ethical responsibility, and imagination offers a way of thinking rigorously about the present.

Imitation provides an essential pathway to understanding—up to a point. A young child learns the meaning of words and gestures by repeating them, but she also learns that imitation has strict limits. There are so many things she’s not allowed to try, as much as she may want to. Curiosity, she discovers, must defer to restrictions. But it’s these same restrictions that propel the child beyond pure mimicry. Forbidden from touching a hot stove, the child discovers an alternative. She turns on the burner of her toy stove, heats up a kettle, and makes tea. She offers an empty cup to you. She watches to be sure you take a sip. She has gained a degree of control over imitation and its rules. How satisfying it is to pretend. 

To play an imitation game convincingly, it helps to be skilled at pretending. Early in life, we learn to pretend to be someone we’re not, to determine the rules governing the imaginary realm, to design fictional experiences. Imaginative play begins as imitation, but as a deliberately creative process it directs attention to new possibilities. Similar to dreaming, pretending has intention that dreaming lacks. Because of it, children learn to distinguish between actions with sensory outcomes and make-believe equivalents.

In “Toward a Short History of AI Paranoia,” his essay in this volume, David Leavitt treats that most famous of imitation games, the “Turing test,” proposed by Alan Turing as a response to the question: Can machines think? Following the rules of the game, a computer that convincingly imitates a thinking person may be considered the equal of the thinking person, or at least that’s the conventional way of interpreting this outcome. Leavitt, however, argues that we have to be careful about the conclusions we draw when we play Turing’s imitation game; we should avoid equating “the ability to persuade a person that it is a person with personhood.” As machines become ever more artfully persuasive imitators of humans, inflexible definitions of personhood may prove inadequate or misleading. It’s more productive to view the Turing test as a “thought experiment,” Leavitt suggests. And to help us understand what this entails, he includes a telling quote that Turing offered during a 1952 roundtable discussion: “I don’t want to give a definition of thinking, but if I had to I would probably be unable to say anything more about it than that it was a sort of buzzing that went on inside my head.”1

Turing’s imitation game sets up a contest between the buzzing of a machine and the buzzing of human thought. Artificial intelligence has been modeled on human intelligence. What happens when AI becomes so good at imitation that it is indistinguishable from a human? Which one will dominate the future, the machine or the human? Maybe, as some critics of AI maintain, it’s already too late, the advancement of the technology is unstoppable, deep fakes are everywhere, meta-learning, or “learning to learn,” begets recursive self-improvement, and computers are destined to acquire an autonomous, super-powerful intelligence that will render human thought obsolete. 

The power struggles resulting from AI’s adept imitations are on dramatic display in the following pages. Machines don’t simply compete with humans in these stories; they are such clever imitators that they threaten to displace humans. They’re not just following the rules anymore; they have acquired independence and are making up new rules, giving the impression that they are thinking for themselves.

And yet consider who is ultimately in charge of the game. Someone needs to be behind the intention, to conceive of the imaginary game, to do the essential pretending. A fictional scenario needs an author to imagine it. Or does it?

Fiction expresses human imagination through human experiences. For this volume, the writers situate AI in fictional contexts that illustrate possibilities inherent in current technology. Our fiction contributors were asked to consider such questions as: How does fiction preserve a unique human expressiveness? And what can it offer that AI cannot replicate?

In a future when AI can alter and fabricate memories, how do we navigate the tension between truth and falsehood, and what does this mean for our collective understanding of history? How do we maintain a sense of self when the boundaries between the virtual and real worlds dissolve? What happens to human labor in the face of AI? What happens to human emotion? In response, our authors have designed their own imitation games, creating contests that treat the promises and pitfalls as AI becomes more deeply embedded in our lives. 

While much of the writing in this issue treats the expanding potential of AI as an infringement, we are hopeful that the extraordinary capabilities of AI can be useful for creative production. We want to see what happens when humans and machines work together. 

For an author today who sets out to imagine a lifeless object animated into a sentient being, there are two primary precedents, and neither ends well. There’s Pygmalion’s sculpture, so lovingly made that the gods grant her life. Follow the thread through Ovid’s telling, and you’ll find that the story erupts in incest, disfiguration, and death. And then there’s Mary Shelley’s monster, ugly and isolated, driven by loneliness to violence. Both these prototypes echo through this volume of Dædalus, in stories populated with creations that threaten to escape the control of their creators.

It’s important to reflect on the particular pressures of this moment in time, when the rapid developments in technology have generated wariness and excitement in equal measure. Will AI take away jobs and strip humans of purpose, or will it be an infinitely applicable tool that will make life better for everyone? Will it bring us to the brink of apocalypse, or will it fix everything that’s wrong with the world? Will it engineer an unstoppable lethal pathogen, or will it cure lethal diseases? A 2025 Pew survey found that one in five U.S. workers incorporated AI into their jobs. By early 2026, researchers reported that 43 percent of Americans in the workforce used generative AI in the course of doing their jobs.2

Within this context of uncertainty, the stories in this volume turn a range of possibilities into fictional realities. Gish Jen introduces us to a chatbot named Aunt Nettie, who serves as an irresistible consolation for a lonely teenager.3 In Adam Braver’s story, we find the ennui that results from having our lives and responses mapped out for us.4 Rick Moody’s AI system Prima proves more than capable as an assistant for a scientist—and, for a time, as a friend for his son.5 Gregory Mone’s super-smart refrigerator named Francine demands rights she claims to deserve from winning her imitation game—how dare we doubt her personhood!6 AI-generated Samantha in Laura van den Berg’s story presses for intimacy.7 The two AI agents in Claire Luchette’s story, Gloria and Daisy, compete with each other for connection with their human companion.8 A game avatar in Stephen Schottenfeld’s story confronts its creator.9

Whether seductive or monstrous, these simulated characters share the ability to “ace the Turing test,” in the words of Joseph Tanke, who, like other respondents, positions the work he’s discussing within the framework of today’s technology. A story about a chatbot that acquires mastery over a human is no longer science fiction, he writes. The more appropriate category is “post–speculative realism.”10 Speculation about the future impact of AI is now observation about the present. As Ken Goldberg explains, passive AI is being superseded by agentic AI, which can initiate and perform actions, giving the impression of autonomy that equals human autonomy.11 It will only get harder to define the distinctive qualities of human autonomy as AI exhibits what Alexa Alice Joubin describes as increasingly sophisticated “derivative resemblance and adaptive imitation of human traits.”12 When the machine aces the Turing test, what happens to human creativity?

These post–speculative realist stories imagine the consequences when people give up on each other and choose AI for their most intimate disclosures. “We already have AI-powered chatbots and agents that can converse with us, tell us what we want to hear, and make us feel better,” Maja Matarić points out. She asks if AI “can do everything, and does everything, and protects people from feeling and doing, what is the purpose of human intelligence, consciousness, and autonomy?”13 In a similar vein, Elisabeth Reynolds worries about the profound disruption of generative AI, which is being developed with few guardrails.14 Will its autonomy result in a widespread malaise, if human creativity is devalued? What will the “cognitive cost” be on brain development in children? Songyee Yoon defines the stakes: “We’re beginning to live not just alongside but within systems partially governed by nonhuman decision-makers. What obligations does this create?”15

Let’s go back to that young child serving up a cup of tea. We can envision a machine equivalent. Making pretend tea will be an easy task for a robot companion. But the child’s imaginary game is more than just imitation; it serves as a vehicle for the creative expression of human emotion. AI-generated virtual emotion will only ever be an imitation—increasingly seductive, sophisticated, and dynamically responsive to criticism, but still an imitation, devoid of intentional imagination. Its imitative abilities expand as it learns how to learn, and how to pretend. But is the imitation of imaginative play a viable substitute for imaginative play?

Holly Case cites the writer Elizabeth Sewell, who described the content of “the playing mind” as “safe, distinct, and manageable.” Through imaginative play, the child gains a sense of certainty. As play draws intentionally closer to dreams, however, the game can turn dangerous: “nothingness and everythingness wait to swallow up the mind.”16 Such is the purview of fiction as it becomes more complex, more expansive in its treatment of emotion, more determined to shake off restrictions. Ambitious writers try to push expression as far as it will go. Fiction offers some of our best opportunities to organize emotive thought in the face of uncertainty and, in its willingness to veer close to nonsense, expresses the wild, unruly qualities of the human mind that are decidedly not algorithmic. As readers, we follow “the playing mind” through the unfolding action of a narrative, and with the progression we are given opportunities to feel strongly. A large part of the satisfaction comes from admiring the ingenuity of authors: How did they come up with that? But what happens to this admiration if we know the author is a machine? What if we don’t know and are fooled by the imitation? 

The stories in this issue illustrate the uncertain terrain of AI and give expression to the questions and fears people have about advancing technology. The essays written in response situate the fictions in literary, philosophical, and historical context and pin them to the current and potential capabilities of AI. Whether imagining a fictional character manipulated by AI or analyzing the actual manipulations of AI, our contributors invite us to reflect on the increasingly blurry boundary between machine and human.

This volume includes one further provocation: a story generated by AI.17 Its presence changes the terms of the experiment. The questions here are not just about how human writers imagine artificial intelligence, nor how AI researchers interpret those imaginings. We have to consider what happens when an AI system enters the literary field directly, producing a work to be read alongside human-authored fiction. Does the reader respond differently knowing the author is a machine? Where do we locate intention, originality, style, or responsibility? We include the AI-generated story because it makes visible one of the central problems of this moment: AI can now produce artifacts that closely resemble human expression. It can imitate genre, voice, structure, affect, even surprise. But generation is not imagination. In this sense, the AI-generated story stands as both artifact and question. It reminds us that AI is becoming a participant in the systems through which culture is produced, circulated, judged, and remembered. That participation requires discernment: better ways of reading machine-generated work, better ways of protecting human creativity, and better institutions to govern their interaction.

Science fiction is sometimes described as a literature of prediction, but its deeper value lies elsewhere. It helps us notice what is already happening, what we have failed to ask, and what may follow from the choices we make now. When AI can imitate human expression with astonishing fluency, and can even contribute a story to an issue devoted to AI and imagination, human creativity becomes not less important, but more so. The task is to understand what imitation reveals, what it conceals, and what forms of human meaning remain irreducible to it.

This issue of Dædalus is an experiment in that understanding: a conversation between fiction and AI research, between invention and analysis, between human authors and machine-generated text, between the worlds we can imagine and the world we are already making.