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Artificial Intelligence (AI) and citizen science (CS) are two approaches to tackling data challenges related to scale and complexity. CS by its very definition relies on the joint effort of typically a distributed group of non-expert people to solve problems in a manner that relies on human intelligence. As AI capabilities increasingly augment or complement human intelligence, if not replicate it, there is a growing effort to understand the role that AI can play in CS and vice versa. With this growing interest as context, this special collection, The Future of AI and Citizen Science, illustrates the many ways that CS practitioners are integrating AI into their efforts, as well as identifies current limitations. In this spirit, our editorial briefly introduces the special collection papers to demonstrate and assess some uses of AI in CS; then, we contextualize these uses in terms of key challenges; and conclude with future directions that use AI with CS in both innovative and ethical ways.