Speculating with Machines: Generative AI in Futures Ethnography

This article advances futures ethnography by examining and demonstrating generative AI’s role in speculative ethnographic practice. Drawing on a workshop set in 2050, where participants explored possible work futures with human and non-human collaborators, we show how ChatGPT shifted from background tool to active participant, co-shaping roles, imaginaries, and decision-making through its discursive interventions. The video camera, too, acted as participant, and together these technologies co-shaped the ethnographic place through their distinct yet overlapping mediations. Through these entanglements, speculation with machines emerges as a methodological practice: ethnography becomes co-constituted through human–machine encounters that stabilize, unsettle, and reconfigure futures, situating futures ethnography as a space for experimenting with generative AI.