As part of a collaboration between Better Images of AI and Cambridge University's Diversity Fund, Hanna Barakat was commissioned to create a digital collage series to depict diverse images about the learning and education of AI at Cambridge. Hanna's series of images complement our competition that we opened up to the public at the end of last year which invited submissions for better images of AI from the wider community – you can see the winning entries here. Hanna provides her thoughts on the challenges of creating images that communicate about AI histories and the inherent contradictions that arise when engaging in this work. As outlined by the Better Images of AI project, normative depictions of AI continue to perpetuate negative gender and racial stereotypes about the creators, users, and beneficiaries of AI. The lack of diversity--and the problematic interpretation of diversity--in AI-generated images is not merely an'output' issue that can be easily fixed.

Artificial intelligence is a 50-year overnight success story. Let's take a look at some of its history. Academics and government support were critical. While it's tough to pinpoint the origin of AI, one of the earliest examples is from the mid-1930s. Alan Turing wrote groundbreaking papers about intelligent computers, and would eventually come up with his famous Turing Test.