PROGRAMME 4

COMMUNICATIONS AND ENGAGEMENT

Strategy Actions

1.1 We will establish the Scottish AI Alliance including board members and start building an effective mechanism to ensure civil society’s full participation.

1.2 We will work with partners to ensure wider strategic alignment complementing the Digital Strategy and Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review (STER).

2.3 Work with partners to align the AI Strategy with other national technology initiatives and programmes.

1.3 In the first 365 days, we will confirm our priorities and establish Task Forces and Communities of Practice to lead our work in these areas.

1.6 Initiate a communications programme to promote the Alliance.

1.7 Establish a community engagement and participation strategy to encourage non-tech businesses and the people of Scotland to adopt and engage with AI.

1.8 Publish a State of AI report to review progress at the end of Year 1 (and in subsequent years).

2.6 Encourage the public to develop their understanding of AI using open online resources.

2.7 Determine the steps required to make sure everyone in Scotland benefits from AI and exercises their rights.

2.9 Develop a plan to influence global AI standards and regulations through international partnerships.

1.9 The Alliance will evolve. We will review our performance regularly and adapt to create sustainable growth and continued innovation. 

This programme of work has seen the most activity in Year 1 and will continue to be core activity going forward into Year 2.  

Year 2 Progress

Community engagement and participation 

Activity in Year 1 included a facilitated workshop with civil society organisations and a commissioned piece of research into best practices in participation and community engagement in strategy delivery. This year we issued a tender for an organisation to help us co-create and co-develop a set of design principles for community engagement and a set of engagement mechanisms.  

We were keen to not make assumptions on how communities across Scotland would like the Scottish AI Alliance to engage with them on various aspects of AI. To ensure meaningful engagement, we wanted to co-design the process with them.  

The tender resulted in the commissioning of The Democratic Society in September 2022 to carry out this co-creation process. A core part of their programme of work was to conduct a series of workshops across Scotland. The workshops were delivered from November 2022 to January 2023.  

Our first workshop in this series took place in-person in Leith’s Out of the Blue Drill Hall, with 11 members of the public present. Our second workshop took place online, with 16 participants. Our third workshop took place at Eden Hall Court, Inverness, with 8 members of the public present.  

In total, we worked with 35 people drawn from across Scotland, with varying levels of data and AI knowledge, varying backgrounds and lived experiences.  

The final report from Democratic Society on this work is now available on the Alliance’s website.  

Once these principles and mechanisms are established, a rolling scenario-based programme of engagement will follow and will involve relevant organisations from civil society.   

Engagement is also tied to our work with the Children’s Parliament and The Alan Turing Institute in Programme 9.  

The Scottish AI Playbook also plays a part in engagement, as we will ensure that it points to quality resources (in addition to our Living with AI MOOC – more below) that are already available to help people increase their understanding of AI.   

Living with AI Course

A key strategy commitment for Year 2 was to develop means by which to encourage the public to develop their understanding of AI using open-source online resources.  

Through a period of research into the online opportunities available to the public, we acknowledged that there was a lack of free, credible online resources that analysed and reviewed the current and futures states of artificial intelligence from a non-technical perspective. This was also the case for resources from a perspective which encouraged learning and reflection from the public to engage with artificial intelligence developments and discourse as it relates to everyday life and situations. From these learnings, the Living with AI course was conceived. 

Living with AI is an online learning experience, free to access and open to everyone with access to an internet-enabled device, be that personal mobile phone or a desktop computer in public library. This five-week experience covers the following areas: 

• Week 1: What is AI? 

• Week 2: Trustworthy, Ethical & Inclusive 

• Week 3: AI in Society 

• Week 4: Working with AI 

• Week 5: The Future of AI 

The aim of Living with AI is to answer frequent questions that people have about artificial intelligence, debunk some common misconceptions, give a balanced view on the benefits and issues of artificial intelligence, and leave our learners in a place where they feel able to critically analyse the use of artificial intelligence in their lives and wider society.  

The Living with AI development process kicked off with the assembly of a working group consisting of representatives from academia and third sector organisations operating in the artificial intelligence space. A high-level overview of the course was developed by the SAIA (Scottish AI Alliance) team and reviewed by the working group, leading to the subsequent engagement of a Content Designer and Audio-visual Content Producer. The services of a Learning Technologist were also employed to upload all content elements to the Learning Management System chosen to host the Living with AI content, the Canvas system currently utilised by The Data Lab.  

Written content for Living with AI has been developed to be engaging, informative, and relatable to the public as they develop their AI knowledge across the five week course. This content has been enhanced by extensive audio and visual content, featuring in excess of 25 different figures in AI from across Scotland and across sectors from human rights law and policing, to climate change and food systems, to healthcare. These expert interviews were filmed in four locations across Scotland, Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow, to showcase a range of diverse thought leadership and local approaches to AI.  

Living with AI will be launched at the Scottish AI Summit in March 2023, with a trailer and opportunity for people to pre-register for the online course. We expect to welcome the first cohort of learners in late May to early June, subject to the results of our user testing and any subsequent redevelopments required. 

Communications and events 

In Year 2 the Scottish AI Alliance carried out a significant programme of communications activity including a rebranding exercise, the launch of a regular events programme and communications activities across a variety of platforms centred around the Strategy’s values of trustworthy, ethical and inclusive AI.  

Year 1 ended with the highly successful inaugural Scottish AI Summit (delivered in Edinburgh and online) and communications at the beginning of Year 2 began was dominated by a large amount of content from the Summit including videos of all sessions, graphical illustrations and photos, all of which contributed significantly to driving up engagement across all of our communications channels.  

A regular events programme, Scottish AI Events, was launched in May 2022 and 11 events (both in-person and online) were held between May and November reaching over 250 people.  

The Scottish AI Alliance’s podcast Turing’s Triple Helix grew its audience steadily throughout the year with a series of podcasts, released monthly, shining a light on the variety of AI activity across Scotland.  

Engagement across all communications channels (LinkedIn, Twitter, podcast, YouTube and Facebook) grew from strength to strength as we develop a wide audience from Scotland and beyond for our content.  

Year 2 of the Strategy’s delivery will culminate in the second Scottish AI Summit and the second State of AI report. The hybrid Scottish AI Summit will be held in Glasgow over 2 days at the end of March 2023. The conference featured speakers, panellists and workshop facilitators representing industry, academia, public and third sector from across Scotland and beyond in an agenda centred on trustworthy, ethical and inclusive AI. 

The Scottish AI Alliance 

As set out by the strategy, the Scottish AI Alliance will evolve. During the rebranding exercise, the structure of the Scottish AI Alliance was streamlined to make it easier to communicate.  

The end of Year 2 also marks the end of the initial two-year term of our Leadership Group members. To ensure continuity, four members of the group will step down. An open recruitment process for new members was launched in November 2022 and was completed in March for a handover at the Scottish AI Summit. The end of Year 2 will also see the inaugural Chair of the Scottish AI Alliance, Gillian Docherty OBE, step down. A new chair has been appointed and will be announced in March 2023.   

A vision setting workshop was convened at the end of 2022, bringing together the whole Scottish AI Alliance (executive team and Leadership Group) to set a vision for the Alliance for Year 3 and beyond. In addition to delivering on it ongoing commitments and programmes of work, a working group will be brought together to use the outputs from the workshop to set out a plan of action for the future of the Scottish AI Alliance.  

Artist commission 

As part of the Scottish AI Alliance’s commitment to engage with as many of the people in Scotland as possible, in Year 2, we explored how we can leverage the arts to do this. The arts as a medium through which we explore as well as steer the potential impacts of AI on people’s lives seemed obvious and that’s where our journey started with The New Real, developing a new AI Art commission. 
 
In partnership with The New Real team at the Edinburgh Futures Institute and The Alan Turing Institute, the British Library and the Scottish AI Alliance launched an open artist commission in December 2022. The New Real: Uncanny Machines commission is looking for an artist interested to reimagine and reshape the interface and interactions between humans and machines. The commission is interested in transformative experiences for audiences fuelled by AI, and works that address key challenges in AI, such as authorship, harmful bias or misinformation. This is a 2 stage commission with Stage 1 awarding £1,000 each to 5 artists to develop their proposal and Stage 2 awarding £15,000 to 1 winning artist to produce and deliver their proposed concept. 81 submissions were received. The jury panel consisted of representatives of each partner organisation and two practitioners. The five Stage 1 recipients will present a talk on their concepts at either AI UK or the Scottish AI Summit. 
 
The final creative output will be exhibited with a festival partner in late Summer/Autumn 2023 and will be dependent on the artform it takes.  

Government Engagement

The Scottish AI Alliance continues to develop strong working relationships with partners across the UK, Europe and beyond. AI knows no borders, therefore our work is international by default. One of our important strands of work has been to contribute to the development of international AI regulation and standards (see more details in Programme 5). We would like to thank our UK and Nordic counterparts in particular for productive conversations on this topic and two-way sharing of AI best practice more broadly. 

Within Scotland, we continue to align our programmes of work with the delivery of Scotland’s Digital Strategy and the Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review (STER) programme, to realise potential synergies in areas such as infrastructure, skills, and investment. In particular, In July 2022, the Scottish Government awarded a five-year £42m contract to Codebase for the delivery of a national network of Tech Scalers (see more details in Programme 6). 

Similarly, while use of AI attracts a set of AI-specific ethical questions (see Programme 5), the Scottish Government recognises that the ethical challenges and opportunities of using data and digital technologies are interlinked. Work is currently underway across several Government directorates to identify synergies and to explore how to bring the different aspects of ethics in the digital world together while ensuring responsible use of data.