Position Map: the AI4 2026 Conference

Created by Sara Rabon, PhD Student and Technology Rhetorician

For Creative Futures Lab Conference, “AI’s Impact on the Creative World.” September 29, 2026

About

Back in August, I attended the Ai4 Business Conference at The Venetian in Las Vegas as a rhetorical and STS field researcher. From August 3rd through August 6th, I participated as an attendee, watching talks, seeing demos, attending meals, and taking notes on language use. Throughout the week, I interviewed 30 individuals, asking how they would define AI in their own words and how they imagine AI's societal impact in the next 5-10 years. This project has been generously supported by the Department of Communication Arts through the Baxter Research Grant and is (hopefully!) the beginning of my dissertation project.

For the Creative Futures Lab Conference, I built this visualization below to offer insight into the different positions concerning definitions of AI and AI's imagined future impacts. The graph below offers a high-level overview of the general positions of attendees and speakers at Ai4. This project is still a work-in-progress, and the findings here should be understood as preliminary. There is much work to be done yet!

Sara smiling in front of the Ai4 sign at the conference.

Position Map

Inspired by Adele Clark's Situational Analysis, I built a preliminary position map based on my field work at Ai4. That is - a high level overview of the different positions held by people in a particular group or place. I aim to analyize how different groups of people understand and imagine AI technologies, so this project looks at how business folks understand the technology. Hover over a dot to see the specific coordinates. Select a specific role (speaker, interviewee) to see only that group. The number next to each dot refers to its de-individualized ID.

Preliminary Findings

The mean and median indicate middle ground positions are more common and more likely. Even the speakers, the people who are incentivized to sell, hold positions reflecting realistic implementation restrictions. This is ultimately a pro-AI business conference, but interviewees still held negative or hesitant poisitons on AI outcomes. All the speakers included had pro-future visions with the exception of 2, while interviewees had a much wider range of future positions.

There are technological deterministic visions around AI implementation happening regardless of what we as a society do. "AI is happening whether you want it or not." However, the tendency towards the middle for the future predictions indicates that human decisions in technological implementation will deeply (if not decisively) shape the outcomes of AI technologies. It will be up to us to use AI in a pro-human, pro-social, pro-future capacity.

Measure	AI Definition	AI Outlook
Mean	-0.47	1.26
Median	-1	-2
Mode	2	2
Standard Devation	1.96	1.79

Method

For this presentation, I coded the responses from 30 interviews and content from 37 presentations by assigning two coordinate numbers based on a (-5,5) scale, corresponding to X - AI definions as unsentient machine to beyond-human sentience and Y - AI outcome predictions from Doomer to Boomer. Each interviewee and speaker was assigned a coordinate corresponding to how their answers or presentation aligned with positions on the following scale. Interviewees were directly asked their opinion on both axis while speakers generally alluded to their position.

I then used Flourish to build the interactive graph and embed it within this webpage. I built this webpage to present the preliminary information for this conference. I wrote most of it myself but Gemini helped my CSS be more mobile friendly.

A chart explaining each number's meaning on the X (AI definition) and Y (AI outcomes) axis

About Sara

Sara is a PhD student in Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture with a PhD minor in Science and Technology Studies (STS). Drawing on her background in computer science, she investigates the social construction of digital technologies through discursive practices across different social worlds. Her work peers into the abstracted layers of digital and physical infrastructures that foreclose individual possibilities, constitute ontologies, and inform the broader societal integration of technologies. Ultimately, she hopes to provide a humanistic perspective to the world of the digital and technical expertise to the world of communication, bridging the disciplines.

srabon@wisc.edu

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Department of Comm Arts

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My website(in progress)

References

Adele E. Clarke, Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory After the Postmodern Turn (Sage Publications, 2005).
Brent Lucia et al., “The Dystopian Imaginaries of ChatGPT: A Designed Cycle of Fear,” Convergence 31, no. 4 (2025): 1233–50.
Candice Rai and Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, eds., Field Rhetoric: Ethnography, Ecology, and Engagement in the Places of Persuasion (University of Alabama Press, 2018).
Ian Hacking, “‘Experiment,’ ‘Observation,’ and ‘The Creation of Phenomena.,’” in Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge Univ. Pr, 1983).
John Cheney-Lippold, “The Silicon Future,” New Media and Society 27, no. 7 (2025): 4164–80, https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241234864.
Karen Hao, Empire of AI (Penguin Books, 2025).
Nik Brown and Brian Rappert, Contested Futures: A Sociology of Prospective Techno-Science (Routledge, 2017), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315259420.
Sara L. McKinnon et al., eds., Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method (Penn State University Press, 2016).
Thomas Hughes, “Technological Momentum,” in Does Technology Drive History?, ed. Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith (MIT Press, 1994).
Wiebe Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (MIT Press, 1997).

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