The British Library and the Programme Committee for the Fantastic Futures 2025 conference are delighted to host presentations and workshops from colleagues around the world about organisations, collections, interest and experience with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies applied to or developed with cultural, research and heritage collections. This includes practitioners in the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) sector and Digital Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Data, Information and Computer Science researchers in Higher Education. 

• Online registration for the 4th and 5th December is open via ConfTool

• Full conference programme available via ConfTool

• Conference dates: December 3 – 5, 2025 

• Location: British Library, London, onsite – with some livestreams and post-event videos 

FF2025 Theme: 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. 

AI4LAM’s aim is 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.