AI+Us Alliance 2026: University of Glasgow 18th February 2026

On Wednesday 18^th February 2026, the University of Glasgow piloted the second event of the AI+Us Festival. This was a free event, attended mostly by university students.

Activities

Attendees were encouraged to engage with community-led discussions and complete the following hands-on activities:

• Paper Avatars: attendees create and bring their own characters to life and explore how they interact with AI
• Machine Seeing – Inside the Black Box: attendees create drawings to spark discussions about concerns, which hidden processes, assumptions, and decisions lie behind AI
• How is AI trained (Oranges): a card game where players teach an AI model to identify and classify oranges, learn about supervised training and the data used for this and why AI sometimes gets the answers wrong
• Types of AI (Foods): a card game about different types of AI (Gen AI, Recommender AI, Decision-Making AI), and how they are used to support our everyday decision-making, like choosing what to eat or watch
• Lo-fi Turing Test: is an activity to test whether you can tell the difference between a human and an AI, or not!
• CulturAI: attendees evaluate a set of AI-generated images, learning and reflecting on appropriate cultural elements but also stereotypes reproduced by AI image generators

Attendees

The event was well attended and well received, with 30 people joining over the course of the morning. The attendees gave feedback about what they learnt and what they want to see in similar future events:

“I learnt about how AI generates. I also learned about how much AI answers can be closer to human answers.”

“I learned that you need to train AI to learn things and distinguish difference.”

“Robot can mimic as human”

“I want to see some discussions on topics, such as new usage methods and ethical crises.”

Reflections

The activities came across as well-designed, suited for purpose, and speaking to a diverse range of audiences. There were many deep, insightful conversations between hosts and participants that segued from a set of quite simple activities. Such activities and interactions have the potential to become a core part of the crucial conversations that we should be having as a society about the risk, challenges, and opportunities related to the AI wave.

Next Steps

Learning from this pilot series of events will inform future efforts and will be used to develop event packs and resources to help others run their own events.