Speculative Friction in AI design and governance
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The Speculative Friction Story Lab is a creative and research-driven space for exploring how legal fiction can surface, examine, and reshape the frictions embedded in AI systems and their governance. The Lab invites contributors to engage with narrative as a method of institutional inquiry. It invites crafting fictional laws, policies, individual and collective experiences, and regulatory worlds that probe moments of misalignment, uncertainty, and tension between human values, institutional structures, and AI systems. By working at the boundary of the real and the possible, we use legal fiction to reveal hidden assumptions, test alternative governance models, and imagine new forms of accountability and agency. Bridging speculative design and real-world policy challenges, the Story Lab cultivates new social imaginaries and expands how AI systems can be designed, governed, and lived with.
Explore the contributions below and join the conversation through the call for proposals!
A Lost Art: What a malfunctioning storytelling AI reveals about overreliance, governance - by Nikki Hekmat, a Political Economy student at UC Berkeley and a 2026 AI Safety Policy Fellow with the Berkeley AI Student Safety Initiative
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Check out the call for proposals and join a growing community working to expand how we think about “the frictions we want” in designing, interacting with, and governing AI systems!
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Newsfeed Notification: Legally Blind Eyewitness to Alleged Murder Confounds Legal Precedents
A speculative journalistic-style news report from 2035 - by Kevin Hunt, Senior Lecturer at Nottingham School of Art & Design
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Talking Heads:
A short story about quiet delegation and the Cognitive Liberty & Data Sovereignty Act - by Melissa Rae Gunning, a researcher pursuing a master’s in clinical linguistics
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