Beyond AI Guidelines: Imagining Futures Worth Wanting (workshop)

A growing number of ethical guidelines aim to steer AI development toward respecting ethical principles such as fairness, transparency, accountability, and privacy. In the challenging quest to translate abstract ideals into actionable requirements, we risk losing sight of the outcomes they were intended to achieve. If AI guidelines were fully realized, what would the world actually look like? How would our relationships, communities, and institutions change (or not)? And is that what we want?

About the workshop

In this workshop, we will move beyond guidelines and explore the underlying values, desires, fears and future visions of AI ethics that can get lost amidst technical details. We invite creative, critical, and experimental contributions that envision futures where ethical principles are (un)successfully embedded or showcase how philosophical reflection about AI can be brought into practice in novel tangible ways (e.g. in the form of design, art, performance, or activities). We welcome submissions from researchers of all academic disciplines, as well as from designers, artists, and activists.

We aim for an interactive format that fosters imagination, critique, and practical exchange, helping us collectively picture and prototype futures worth wanting. The workshop structure will be designed to support the content of the selected works. If you have a specific format in mind, please mention this in your submission.

Topics of interest

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Imagining futures implied by AI ethics principles
• Values beyond those typically mentioned in guidelines
• Successes, failures, unexpected consequences, or lessons learned from implementing AI guidelines
• Co-creation of future visions
• Non-guidelines approaches to ethics in AI system development, implementation and governance

Submission types

Short papers or essays (max 3000 words)

• Speculative, conceptual, or scenario-based works
• Case studies

Creative or artistic works (max 2 pages text description + [optional] pictures)

• Fiction, speculative design, visual art, or performance
• Demonstrations of prototypes, installations, interactive works

Submit your contribution

Please submit your work as a pdf file via email to c.j.m.bollen@tue.nl by May 31st, 2026.