Introduction: Rethinking AI interfaces

As machine learning systems sediment themselves more deeply into the substrates of everyday life and thought, their interfaces—those seemingly neutral thresholds—have emerged with urgency as active sites of cultural, technical, and aesthetic negotiation. While design has long engaged questions of epistemology, politics, and imagination, if generative AI marks a phase shift not only in capability but in relationality, then interfacial regimes become critical zones of reconfiguration—not simply as sites of mediation, but of mutual implication, where knowledge, power, and subjectivities are co-constituted.