'Learning with AI' is an open-source book from the University of Leeds . We spoke with Chrissi Nerantzi, part of the project team about their choice to use Ariyana Ahmad's illustration'AI is Everywhere' for the cover of the book. For the team, the choice of cover was about more than just visual aesthetic. Collages can capture multiple perspectives, textures, and approaches, much like the student voices incorporated throughout the book. Ahmad's illustration, while not a collage, achieves a similar effect.

From 10th to 12th September 2025, Barcelona hosted an academic gathering at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya: the first Hype Studies Conference, titled "(Don't) Believe the Hype!?" Organised by a transnational, collective research group of scholars and practitioners, the conference drew together researchers, activists, artists, journalists, and technology professionals to examine hype as a significant force shaping contemporary society. Hype Studies is an emerging academic field that analyses how and why excessive expectations form around technologies, ideas, or phenomena, and what effects those expectations have on society, culture, economics, and policy. As the playful brackets around "Don't" in the conference title suggest - both a warning and an invitation to question that warning - the aim of the conference wasn't to simply reject hype, but to understand it. The conference approached hype critically by examining it as a phenomenon with real power and consequences that needs to be understood and questioned. The purpose here was to build collective knowledge about hype, develop better and more concrete theories, share empirical findings, and create an interdisciplinary community whilst advancing the field's scholarship and knowledge.

A quick internet search on this topic will usually produce images of smiling, or perplexed, people looking into a computer. Often these people are surrounded by an array of intimidating holograms associated with spatial computing that barely yet exist in our real working lives. In many cases, images of a white, male hand – one finger extended – meets the elegant finger of a white, humanoid robot. But this is not what really happens at work. We know that visualising the future is hard, because we've used some of these images at the Digit Centre ourselves in the past.

The ESRC Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Digit) and Better Images of AI (BIoAI) are delighted to announce a competition to reimagine the visual communication of how work is changing in the digital age, including through the adoption of AI. Digit has undertaken a significant five-year research programme culminating in insights about real-world digital transformations currently impacting people's daily lives. The research undertaken by Digit between 2020 and 2025 points to the fact that adoption of technologies like AI is still patchy across the UK, and investment in digital skills is low. There are examples of AI being used to substitute or automate repetitive tasks, but this has not, as yet, resulted in significant job losses. Furthermore, technology adoption is facilitating experimentation with how, when, and where people work which presents new opportunities, but also challenges to our existing institutional and regulatory governance frameworks.

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.

At the end of 2024, we [Better Images of AI] launched a public competition with Cambridge Diversity Fund calling for images that reclaimed and recentred the history of diversity in AI education at the University of Cambridge. We were so grateful to receive such a diverse range of submissions that provided rich interpretations of the brief and focused on really interesting elements of AI history. Dr Aisha Sobey set and judged the challenge, which was enabled by funding from Cambridge Diversity Fund. Entries were judged on meeting the brief, the forms of representation reflected in the image, appropriateness, relevance, uniqueness, and visual appeal. This image is inspired by Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.

Articles about AI in the media are often accompanied by images of blue brains, white robots, and flying maths, sometimes only tangentially related to the content being reported. Due to these poor image choices, communications from media sources and marketing materials risk misinforming or misleading the public about how AI works and the impact it can have. However, finding images that better represent the research and technologies is difficult. A recent project has focussed on providing people with the sources and knowledge necessary to create their own images. The Archival Images of AI project has been exploring how existing images – especially those from digital heritage collections – can be remixed and reused to create new images, particularly to represent AI in more compelling ways.

In this blog post, Anna Nadibaidze explores the main themes found across common visuals of AI in the military domain. Inspired by the work and mission of Better Images of AI, she argues for the need to discuss and find alternatives to images of humanoid'killer robots'. Anna holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) and is a researcher for the AutoNorms project, based at SDU. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies into the military domain, especially weapon systems and the process of using force, has been the topic of international academic, policy, and regulatory debates for more than a decade. The visual aspect of these discussions, however, has not been analysed in depth. This is both puzzling, considering the role that images play in shaping parts of the discourses on AI in warfare, and potentially problematic, given that many of these visuals, as I explore below, misrepresent major issues at stake in the debate.

In July, 2023, Science Gallery London and the London Office of Technology and Innovation co-hosted a workshop helping Londoners think about the kind of AI they want. In this post, Dr. Peter Rees reflects on the event, describes its methodology, and celebrates some of the new images that resulted from the day. Who can create better images of Artificial Intelligence (AI)? There are common misleading tropes of the images which dominate our culture such as white humanoid robots, glowing blue brains, and various iterations of the extinction of humanity. Better Images of AI is on a mission to increase AI literacy and inclusion by countering unhelpful images.