Space & Time AI Discovery Issue 2023 #144

The oldest continuously published speculative fiction semi-pro magazine in print turns its gaze toward one of the most urgent creative questions of our time with Space & Time Issue #144: AI Discovery Issue 2023.

This special issue explores what happens when writers, poets, artists, editors, and artificial intelligence meet on the page. Contributors were invited to use AI as part of their creative process in innovative ways, resulting in a bold experimental issue filled with fiction, poetry, essays, process notes, AI statements, and speculative art that examine collaboration, authorship, anxiety, possibility, and the future of storytelling.

Inside, readers will find works that engage with digital ghosts, AI companions, emergent futures, online intimacy, algorithmic creativity, synthetic voices, airborne plague, robot-human harmony, living code, and the uneasy border between tool, collaborator, and creator.

Issue #144 features work by Leonard Speiser, Angela Yuriko Smith, Austin Farmer & AI, Tom Howard, Jennifer Shelby, Anna Taborska, J. Thorn, Don DeBrandt, James Hong, Colleen Anderson, Chris McAuley, Bryant O’Hara, Dave Hangman, RK Rugg, Kayla Wiltfong, Jonathan Ukah, Jen Nafziger & ChatGPT, and more.

Also included are behind-the-story notes showing how contributors used tools such as ChatGPT, GPT-4, Bing, MidJourney, and other AI systems to brainstorm, revise, generate prompts, create images, test ideas, and interrogate the creative process itself.

At once curious, skeptical, playful, and forward-looking, Space & Time Issue #144 is more than a magazine issue. It is a time capsule from the early days of mainstream generative AI, capturing a moment when writers began asking not only what AI could do, but what human creativity becomes when reflected back through the machine.