Fantastic Futures 2025: AI Everywhere, All at Once
AI4LAM’s annual conference, December 3 – 5, 2025, British Library, London
FF2025 conference theme was ‘AI Everywhere, All at Once’. While AI has a long history in academia and practice, the release of public language models like ChatGPT propelled AI into public consciousness. The sudden appearance of AI ‘tools’ in the software we use every day, government consultations on AI and copyright and the hype about Artificial Intelligence mean that libraries, museums and archives must understand what AI means for them. Should they embrace it, resist it or fear it? How does it relate to existing practices and services, how can it help or undermine staff, and how do we keep up with rapid changes in the field?
There are many opportunities and many challenges in delivering AI that create rich, delightful and immersive experiences of GLAM collections and spaces for the public, and meet the needs of researchers for relevant, reliable and timely information. Challenges range from the huge – environmental and economic sustainability, ensuring alignment with our missions, ethical and responsible AI, human-centred AI, ensuring value for money – to the practical – evaluation, scalability, cyber security, multimodal collections – and throughout it all, managing the pace of change.
Our aim was to promote interdisciplinary conversations that foster broader understandings of AI methods, practices and technologies and enable critical reflections about collaborative approaches to research and practice.
Catch up now:
- Conference repository: https://doi.org/10.23636/54k0-ny43
- Full conference programme available via ConfTool
- Recordings of Thursday & Friday available via the AI4LAM YouTube channel