Futures Studies and Artificial Intelligence: First Results of an Experimental Collaborative Approach

In this paper we describe an experiment involving different types of visual communication of future scenarios. The final aim is to provide experts involved in Delphi-based applications with simpler and more appropriate tools for understanding the scenarios to be evaluated. The work represents a part of the "Domani in Famiglia" project carried out over the past five years. Specifically, the research was conducted to construct some future scenarios on the family in Northeastern Italy, over a 10-year horizon. With the diffusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, different implementations can support the process of representing scenarios, such as the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to generate images and videos starting from textual narratives. This application intercepts the very active scientific debate about the risks/opportunities of AI; such as regards ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) which is polarizing the opinions of the scientific community and which has also become a great media case. In our experiment, in particular, the use of three distinct and alternative modalities of visual communication is investigated: i) textual; ii) with comics; iii) by video. Some experts of the Millenium Project network will be asked to evaluate the different modes according to certain criteria. The results can be generalized to all more articulated and complex contents that, like scenarios, are generally configurable as a union of several elementary elements.