When imagination becomes the site of ethics
In October 2025, EthicsLab at the University of Cape Town, in collaboration with the Department of English and Literary Studies, convened creatives and literary scholars for three days at Bertha Retreat in Boschendal to ask what it means to imagine and create in an age of intelligent machines. The AI and the Imagination retreat explored how AI transforms imagination — both as a concept that underpins creativity and as an ethical practice through which we make sense of being human.
Rather than approaching AI solely as a technical tool or an ethical problem to be solved, the retreat positioned imagination itself as the central object of inquiry. Participants were invited to consider how AI unsettles long-standing ideas about authorship, originality, authenticity, voice, and the sacred — and how these disruptions are already being negotiated in literary, visual, and storytelling practices.
Through sessions that moved between conversation, experiment, and play, participants explored themes such as the moral work of storytelling, the porous line between generation and creation, and the shifting meaning of originality in a world of remix. We asked what becomes of the “human touch” when machines can convincingly mimic it, and whether imagination itself might be a shared — even contested — space between humans and their technologies.
Early sessions focused on establishing a shared language for thinking about AI: what generative systems can and cannot do, and why ethical concerns around data extraction, intellectual property, and the concentration of power matter for creative work.
From there, conversations moved more explicitly into narrative terrain, challenging dominant global framings of AI as inevitable and instead asking what alternative futures African creatives might imagine.
A central thread running through the retreat was storytelling as an ethical project. Across two linked sessions, participants worked directly with AI-generated story prompts, crafting their own endings and reflecting on the moral labour involved in narrative closure. These exercises foregrounded storytelling not simply as creative expression, but as a site of responsibility, judgment, and care — raising difficult questions about whether AI can meaningfully participate in ethical imagination, or whether it merely mirrors human values without accountability.
Other sessions grappled with originality and remix, the boundary between generation and creation, and the possibility of imagination beyond the human. Through discussion, video screenings, and creative practice — including a paint-and-sip experiment comparing human sketches with AI-generated interpretations — participants tested where AI augments creative practice and where it flattens or misrecognises it.
The retreat closed by exploring what an African-grounded agenda on AI, creativity, and ethics might require: which questions cannot be ignored, which inherited debates need re-opening, and how the arts might function as a terrain of ethical critique and worldmaking.
A set of recurring questions sustained our curiosity over the three days, lingering as provocations to carry forward:
- Can creative and literary methods illuminate the ethical, political, and ontological stakes of machine intelligence in ways that formal policy cannot?
- If storytelling is one of the ways we exercise moral imagination — showing whose experiences matter and what forms of care or justice a world makes possible — what does it mean when machines can generate stories detached from experience, emotion, or consequence?
- Do global narratives of inevitability foreclose imagination? How can African creators resist fatalism about AI’s trajectory and treat it instead as a site of ethical and imaginative choice?
- Is AI’s simulation of creativity feeding culture or polluting it? Drawing on Kate Crawford’s idea of a cultural metabolism, if machines now feed on our collective archives to generate new content, are we witnessing the enrichment of culture or its recycling into low-nutrient slop? How can we tell when the metabolism of imagination sustains creative life and when it begins to starve it?
- How does bias travel through code, and what forms of caricature or invisibility does it produce? Revisiting Binyavanga Wainaina’s How to Write About Africa, what stereotypes resurface in AI’s generative outputs, and how might African writers and artists subvert them?Can counter-narrative prompting or dataset curation become acts of decolonial authorship?
- What does it mean to ask what makes art African in the age of AI? If postcolonial debates, from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o onward, centred on the intimacy between language, audience, and lived experience, how do we revisit those concerns when creative expression is mediated through systems that universalise and abstract? What becomes of authenticity and relevance when imagination itself is routed through algorithmic forms?
In the end, the retreat made room for slow, careful thinking across disciplines and practices, anchored in shared questions about what is at stake when machines increasingly participate in cultural production. Moving between conversation, creative practice, and collective reflection, AI and the Imagination reaffirmed the arts as a vital site for thinking critically about technological innovation and its implications for imagination, creativity, and ethical life.
