8th JULY UPDATE: CLICK HERE FOR EVENT PACK AND PROGRAMME
Join the We and AI community at King’s College London on 8 July
Many argue that the current trajectory of AI is inevitable and that the only option left for us is to accept and adapt. Dangerous political narratives about the technology prevail such as when politicians describe AI as a “revolution”. Many governments such as in the UK also fail to provide critical AI literacy to enable people to participate in the discussions and decisions on AI development.
There are however many ways in which people can, and already do, challenge the current trajectory of AI. Many initiatives and projects show us that the extractive direction of AI does not have to be inevitable. To highlight this, we are hosting a full day of workshops, talks and interactive activities during London Data Week focused on reclaiming and reimagining AI.
The programme includes an inspiring line-up of activities such as a workshop on co-creating new tech futures, one on zine-making and quiet refusal, and a workshop where we will discuss how critical AI literacy is key for building community-centred visions of AI.
The programme will end with the UK launch of our most recent project, the AI Resist List (airesistlist.org), bringing together researchers, scholars and practitioners for an interactive event with short lightning talks and audience questions aimed at centering hope, community as well as sharing knowledge, challenges and tactics on countering the inevitability narratives of AI.
You can find the full day programme here below, and more information about the London Data Week programme here.
Detailed programme
Please note that you need to sign up separately to each workshop/event that you want to join.
09:30 – 10:55: Crafting Participatory Tech Futures
by Ismael Kherroubi Garcia, Ramla Anshur, Ve Dewey and Obhi Chatterjee
An interactive workshop led by the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Network (RAIN), this session invites civil society, academia and non-profits to affirm imagination as a collective practice.
What if AI futures were not something delivered to us, but something we could deliberate, contest, and build together? What if diverse publics could gather to imagine technological futures grounded in real societal and ecological needs, and chart practical pathways toward them?
This session invites participants to affirm imagination as a collective practice. Through participatory world-building, we will move beyond abstract optimism or dystopian critique, and instead co-define actionable, justice-oriented AI futures.
- Discovery: Discover futures thinking as a critical practice that examines how imagined futures shape present decisions, power structures, and technological trajectories.
- Encounters: Through dialogue and reflection, collaboratively articulate future scenarios that feel socially, environmentally, and politically meaningful. Rather than tightly scripted facilitation, this phase encourages emergent conversation, prioritizing story-telling over theory.
- Crafting: Tell new stories and potential journeys that link the diverse futures that you imagined together
09:35 – 10:45: Policing, Algorithms & Us: An Accountability Workshop
by Grace Davis
This interactive workshop explores how AI-driven policing and surveillance technologies are shaping everyday life in the UK, with a focus on their racialised impacts.
Led by Grace Davis from BLAM UK (Black Learning Achievement and Mental Health), the session introduces participants to key AI policing tools through abolitionist and anti-racist frameworks.
Participants will learn how to identify surveillance technologies in their own lives, understand their rights, and explore practical strategies for community autonomy and resistance through the co-creation of an AI accountability tool. Calling all interested in policing, technology, racial justice, and education.
11:00 – 12:00: Data, Power, and Possibility: Mapping Pathways Beyond AI Inevitability
by Carolina Ossa
If AI systems depend on vast amounts of data generated through our actions, relationships, communities, and everyday lives, what influence might we already hold in shaping technological futures?
This interactive workshop invites participants to explore a different response to AI inevitability. Before we can reimagine technological futures, we must first understand how power, value, and influence already flow through the systems around us. Together, we’ll examine the relationship between data and AI, and envision it as a source of power and possibility.
Through collaborative mapping activities, we will explore where in our lives data is generated, captured, and transformed into value; who benefits and who bears the costs; and reimagine those sites as opportunities for collective empowerment, negotiation, agency and preferred forms of stewardship.
Drawing on participatory design, systems thinking, and futures practices, participants will create a shared map of the relationships and infrastructures shaping our digital lives while exploring how communities might exercise greater agency over the data they create together.
11:00 – 12:00: Breaking down AI: Technologies, Myths, Realities
by Dylan Orchard
Join Reclaiming Futures at King’s College London for a panel of three researchers describing three different faces of AI, offering a simple introduction for the general public, and anyone curious to understand more about it.
We will explore AI, not as a monolith, but as a complex, multifaceted and sometime contradictory ecosystem.
Each researcher will give 10 minute presentation, leaving 30 minutes for questions and open discussion.
12:15 – 13:55: Developing Critical AI Literacies: Towards more participatory futures
by Bruna Martins, Tania Duarte, Aphie Gover, Mhari Aitkin and Cinzia Pusceddu
A workshop for people in charities, education, research, policy, public sector and community roles to explore the theory and practices of developing critical AI literacy (CAIL).
We start with: the reasons for the emergence of Critical AI literacy and how it is defined, why it is a necessary intervention prior to, or alongside skills and technical education on AI, and how it can enable more participatory, community focused input into if, when and how AI is used.
Then we will explore principles, delivery methods and creative practice. This includes breakout sessions on: empowering children and young people or lifelong learning, conducting participatory research and code design that can better reflect participants’ values and imagination for more community-centred visions of AI.
Finally, get a sneak peek demo of a new resource library for those delivering critical AI literacy interventions for different audiences, developed by We and AI with support from Our AI Collective CIC and Tecer Digital.
We are launching the first ever merch stand from Better Images of AI and friends, after popular demand and as an attempt to fundraise for the volunteer-run and funded project.
Throughout the day, visitors can purchase exciting themed postcards of some of the most compelling images from the Better Images of AI library, and stickers featuring images and slogans which inspire or amuse us.
The money raised will be reinvested in the project to support the administrative costs of running the library.
14:10 – 15:25: Co-developing a responsible AI framework: a working session for civil society organisations
by Bruna Martins
Civil society and community organisations are being asked to make decisions about technology faster than most of us feel ready to make them. We are weighing up tools whose risks we do not fully understand, developed in ways that don’t align with our values, while the same technologies are being used in ways that affect the communities we serve, the people who trust us with their information, and the work we do. Most individual decisions, anchored in principles of resisting, refusing, reclaiming and reimagining AI, don’t easily translate into organisational settings where risks and opportunities are shared.
In this session, participants map the risks of using AI inside their own work and the risks of AI being used against them and the communities they serve. What the room produces becomes the raw material for an open framework, co-developed with a working group drawn from participants and published with named co-authors.
14:25 – 15:25: Zine against the machine
by Dylan Orchard
What if the future wasn’t digital? This zine-making workshop encourages you to explore, via visual storytelling, on paper, a world where technologies like AI are rejected and resisted. The zine – a handmade magazine that’s low-cost and made with passion – has a long history in counterculture. Join us to create, learn, and express your ideas in your very own zine. No prior experience is required, just a willingness to experiment.
15:30 – 17:30: Launch of the AI Resist List: Community forum for Possible Futures
Some say that AI – run by a small group of billionaires and consuming an unfathomable amount of data, land, energy, labour, and water – is inevitable.
But the recent release of the AIResistList.org shows how people around the world are proving that alternative futures are possible. And that communities are finding many creative ways to push back against extractive AI.
This UK launch of the AI Resist List brings together researchers, community organisers and people directly involved with the projects shared in the list, to give short talks. They include:
Mhairi Aitken
Our AI Collective CIC
Eleanor Taylor
Permacomputing
Sinem Görücü
Memetivism
Zoya Yasmine
Better Images of AI
Professor Kate Devlin
Digital Futures Institute, KCL
Dr Stef Garastro
University of Greenwich
Joan Kinyua
The Data Labelers Association
Maurice Carney
Friends of the Congo
Dr Zeerak Talat
University of Edinburgh
Rachel Coldicutt
Society of Hopeful Technologists
Dr Tim Squirrell
Foxglove
Grace Davies
BLAM UK
Jemima Gibbons
Sticks & Stones
Dr Yulu Pi
University of Warwick
Alex Lawrence-Archer
AWO
The Possible Futures Community
PFC
Tania Duarte
We and AI
Marion Meyers
We and AI
Throughout the day, there will also be an exhibition of artwork from the Better Images of AI library, which features as one of the projects on the AI Resist List. The exhibition was curated by CHIA.
Stock image libraries are full of images of AI which reinforce dangerous misconceptions and limit the public understanding of the current use and workings of AI systems, their potential and implications.
Through various artwork presented in the exhibition, see how artists have visualised AI in more transparent or realistic ways than relying on scifi tropes – from using archival materials to drawing upon visual metaphors.
Our partners and community
‘A day of reimagining and reclaiming AI’ programme is supported by the Institute for Design Informatics and Changing Ideas. Workshop space has been donated by King’s College London as part of London Data Week, with support from the Digital Futures Institute. The exhibition has been created by the Centre for Human Inspired Artificial Intelligence (CHIA).
The event has been organised by volunteers at We and AI including Better Images of AI and The AI Resist List, with input from partners Our AI Collective, BLAM UK, Tecer Digital, RAIN, and Kairoi.
We are grateful for the support, and for our wider community who show what more equitable, regenerative and positive futures can look like.
About London Data Week
London Data Week is the capital’s leading public festival of data and artificial intelligence. Founded in 2023 by the Mayor of London, LOTI and The Alan Turing Institute, it has established itself as a defining moment in London’s annual innovation calendar – convening thousands of participants and hundreds of organisations to explore how data shapes the city and the lives of those within it.
The festival provides an open platform for collaboration, learning and public engagement, working with partners across industry, academia and government to advance a shared commitment to responsible, inclusive and impactful data practice.