Between Wednesday 24 May and Sunday 28 May, the King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence held a Festival of Artificial Intelligence, welcoming over 1000 people to a series of events dedicated to exploring the latest developments in artificial intelligence and some of the challenges and opportunities they pose. The festival programme covered a broad range of topics, including law, surgery, human-AI relationships, art, and the impact of AI on video games and music. There were also opportunities to participate in King’s AI research through a series of demonstrations, including family-friendly events suitable for younger festival-goers such as a ‘Build a Robot’ workshop and ‘Fantastic (Artificial) Beasts and Where to Find Them’ involving games, quizzes, puzzles to unmask AI’s secrets. 

Professor Michael Luck, Director of the King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence, chaired the opening panel on the first day of the festival. The panel included Professor Rachel Mills (Senior Vice President (Academic), King's College London), Matt Dunn (CTO, Europe, Darktrace), Dr Daniele Magazzeni (AI Research Director and Head of Explainable AI Center of Excellence, J.P. Morgan) and Professor Joanna Zylinska (Professor of Media Philosophy and Critical Digital Practice, King's College London), and addressed key AI developments, issues and debates, including AI in higher education, potential dangers of AI in the context of security, how AI explainability can help build public confidence, the impact of AI technologies on art, and more.

Commenting on the panel discussion, one attendee said:

King’s academics delivered public talks throughout the festival. Professor Luca Viganò from the Department of Informatics explored how fairy tales illustrate key concepts of AI and cybersecurity, Professor Dan Hunter from the Dickson Poon School of Law examined the law and ethics of generative AI, and Professor Prokar Dasgupta from the School of Immunology & Microbial Sciences shared the digital future of surgery with audiences, including a live demonstration of the Versius Virtual Reality system used to train surgeons in robotic surgery. In the context of AI and art, Digital Humanities featured strongly, with Professor Joanna Zylinska exploring human and machine creativity, and Dr Kate Devlin considering the potentials and pitfalls of fostering friendships and intimacy with computer software and hardware (pictured below).

AI and creativity was explored throughout the festival. Audiences were prompted to consider questions such as ‘Can computers be creative?’, ‘Do AI image generators such as DALL·E 2 mean the end of art?’, and ‘How might AI art impact society and humanity's self-conception?’. The future of music was also the focus of several festival activities, with a performance of AI-generated songs by Algorithmix (a band that included PhD students from the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Safe and Trusted AI, Usman Islam, Michelle Nwachukwu, Madeleine Waller and Stefan Roesch), and a public demonstration challenging people to differentiate between human-made and AI-generated music.

The festival included public screenings of the short films, ‘MERCY’ and ‘The First’. ‘MERCY’ explores AI and algorithms in the judicial system, while ‘The First’ uses the concept of the Turing Test to ask “what happens when humans turn the tables on machines?”. The public were also invited to view a screening of GROUPTHINK, a live networked performance by sitarist Shama Rahman, guitarist Mick Grierson and video generated by an AI trained on the National Gallery's collection, before participating in a Q&A with GROUPTHINK collaborators, Ali Hossaini, Shama Rahman (pictured below), Olive Gingrich, Luca Viganò and Diego Sempreboni. 

The final day of the festival was dedicated to AI and the future of games. Coordinated by Dr Michael Cook from the Department of Informatics, scientists, sociologists, game designers, YouTube essayists, AI engineers, and more, came together to examine how AI might change the future of how we play, make and watch games. Attendees of the workshop entitled ‘Next Level – AI and the Future of Games’ complimented “the wide and diverse range of speakers coming at the topic of AI and games from different angles.”