Responsive to the rapid evolution of and spirited public discourses around generative artificial intelligence (AI), we offer this special issue as a conceptual and empirical (re)imagining of pasts, presents and futures of composing, education, and algorithmic lifeworlds (Gilbert, 2018;Habermas, 1987). At the edge of a post-digital era in which everyday life is thoroughly enmeshed with digital technologies (Jandri c et al., 2018;Nichols and Garcia, 2022;Liz arraga, 2023;Stornaiuolo et al., 2017), the next generation of automated systems in the form of generative AI presents a rupture point felt in spaces of creativity and authorship across industries, schools, and beyond. This rupture is marked by converging accelerations that include increased speed in the evolution of natural language processing, large language models, and neural network technologies, alongside the corporate race to integrate, hype and profit from the capacities of automated decision-making encoded across digital platforms.This acceleration is also felt in the increasing reach across publics and communities via chatbot interfaces to access and engage with previously out-of-reach multimedia generation tools. Furthermore, the dazzling speed at which AI renders vibrant videos, images, or written texts can preclude closer examinations of what, exactly, is being produced and reproduced through these processes. Although marketed as novel, outputs are flattened facsimiles of existing training dataincomplete pasts of digitized text and media rife with technoableism (Shew, 2020), intersectional racism (Buolamwini and Gebru, 2018) and techno erasure (Small, 2023). "Generative" in this sense can be misleading. As machine learning is increasingly autonomously recursive in nature, artificial intelligence is a historical rather than future-making act of creation (Hughes-Warrington, 2022). Instead of predicting and generating "new" futures in language, art and media, it calculates and renders a most likely past.This rupture point thus necessitates attention to the accelerated creation potential that AI technologies offer in the name of revolutionary progress, which cannot be disentangled from the violent disruptions they impose upon the world. Concurrent with the accelerations of creative processes through generative AI are perils such as invisiblized and exploitative labour (