Reimagining AI for sustainability: Cultivating imagination, hope, and response-ability

While the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in sustainability efforts continues to grow, dominant approaches remain narrowly focused on optimization, prediction, and control. This paper challenges the predictive/optimizing paradigm by proposing a relational perspective on AI—one that treats uncertainty not as a problem to eliminate, but as a generative space for creativity, care, and transformation. Drawing on theories of relational agency, imagination, and hope, we explore how AI can participate in co-creating more ethical, empathetic, and ecologically attuned practices. Leveraging a preexisting case of AI-driven wildlife management in India, we conduct an analysis of a possible and desirable future, demonstrating how AI's affordances might be reconfigured and expanded: from tools of surveillance and efficiency to invitations for listening, attunement, and world-making. In this reimagined mode, AI supports not only the processing of data but the emergence of stories—enabling practitioners to sense, interpret, and respond to ecological entanglements in ways that foreground more-than-human perspectives and collective vulnerability.

We contribute to the growing discourse on sustainable AI by theorizing how practices of imagination and hope can cultivate response-able agency—a form of ethical responsiveness grounded in interdependence rather than mastery. Ultimately, we call for a reorientation of AI design and governance toward practices that do not merely optimize what is, but help bring forth what could be.