We and AI

We and AI is a London-based charitable company incorporated in May 2021 that works on critical AI literacy and narrative change around artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on communities least included in AI decision-making. Its self-stated mission is to "increase public voice" in AI governance by equipping people to think critically about AI, to decode the dominant narratives that frame it as inevitable or neutral, and to participate as informed actors in decisions about how it is built and deployed.

Founding and structure

We and AI Ltd was incorporated on 5 May 2021 as a private company limited by guarantee without share capital — the standard UK legal form for a non-profit charitable company — and registered at 80 Sirdar Road, London W11 4EG (company number 13376771). The organisation was founded by Tania Duarte, formerly CMO at TPX Impact and head of marketing at FutureLearn, who was named one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics™ in 2021 and one of Computer Weekly's 20 Most Influential Women in UK Tech in 2025. Duarte also coordinated the definitions group for the IEEE P7015 Standard for Data and AI Literacy, Skills, and Readiness, and sat on the Public Engagement and Ecosystem Strategy Advisory Board of The Alan Turing Institute.

The organisation runs as a volunteer social-justice collective with three interlocking work areas: advocacy for critical AI literacy in public discourse; design and delivery of literacy content for non-specialist communities; and advisory guidance to charitable, policy, and research organisations on inclusive AI communication. Its board and director layer includes Steph Wright (Board Director; Co-Founder/CEO of Our AI Collective; instrumental in Scotland's first national AI strategy), Marc Goblot (Executive Board Director; founded Tech For Disability; RSA Fellow and UK Government advisor on assistive tech and AI's impact on marginalised groups), Zoya Yasmine (Company Secretary; DPhil in Law at Oxford; research on UK IP/data protection and medical machine-learning bias), Ismael Kherroubi Garcia (Associate Director; established the Alan Turing Institute's research ethics committee in 2020; founder of Kairoi AI ethics consultancy), Cinzia Pusceddu (Associate Director; Senior Fellow by Advance HE; academic experience across Italy, UK, and US), and Bruna Martins (Associate Director; founder of Tecer Digital; designs AI policy engagement programmes for civil society).

Theory of change: narrative first

We and AI's core argument is that dominant AI narratives — drawn from science fiction, tech-industry marketing, and academic jargon — restrict the policy debate before it begins by framing AI as a technical inevitability rather than a socially contested set of choices. On this reading, low public literacy is not an incidental deficit but a structural condition that concentrates power in the hands of those who control the narrative: labs, large technology companies, and credentialled experts. A 2023 survey by the UK's Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, cited by Duarte and Kherroubi Garcia, found that 84% of the UK public feel disenfranchised and excluded from AI decision-making and mistrust key institutions. We and AI's response is to build literacy capacity that is independent of commercial interests — resources and programmes that help communities understand AI on their own terms, not through the frameworks of the companies building it.

Better Images of AI

Better Images of AI is We and AI's most widely used programme, a non-profit collaborative image library providing free, realistic, and critically informed visual representations of AI for anyone to use. The project addresses a known problem in science communication: stock imagery of AI — humanoid robots, glowing neural nets, disembodied brains — routinely misrepresents how AI systems actually work and, by priming associations with science fiction, actively distorts public policy debate. We and AI coordinates the collaboration alongside BBC R&D and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, with BBC R&D donating web design, production skills, and the initial artist commission at launch. The library commissions and curates images from artists and photographers that represent AI's social and material dimensions — workers, data centres, sensors, communities — and makes them available under open licences for news editors, educators, and communicators.

Community workshops and public education

We and AI designs and runs community workshops on AI and sociotechnical concepts pitched for non-specialist audiences, covering AI context-setting, hype decoding, visual imaginaries, and narratives of inevitability. The organisation also worked with the Scottish Government and Scottish AI Alliance to produce "Living with AI", a free online course deliberately written for average Scottish reading levels rather than for technically literate audiences — one of the organisation's clearest articulations of the argument that public AI literacy investment must be accessible outside specialist communities.

Open Letter to the UK Government

In July 2025 We and AI published an Open Letter to the UK Government calling for investment in public AI literacy — a position that the government's 2025 AI literacy strategy subordinated to skills training. An updated version published in February 2026 carried more than 100 signatories from universities, nonprofits, and civil society organisations across the UK and internationally, including figures from Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, King's College London, and UCL. The letter makes four demands: scale comprehensive critical AI literacy programmes accessible to all; commission independent materials uncoupled from corporate training tools; partner with local UK organisations and civil society; and establish a dedicated government meeting to co-create public education initiatives. The signatories' core argument is that relying on American technology companies to define and fund UK public AI literacy concentrates the framing of what AI is and does in precisely the hands whose interests the public most needs to scrutinise.

The AI Resist List

In May 2026 We and AI co-produced The AI Resist List, a publicly accessible, crowdsourced living database documenting acts of resistance to the AI industry from across the world, alongside author and journalist Karen Hao, DAIR Institute, and the Refugee Law Lab at York University. The database is organised around the Countering AI Inevitability Framework — developed at least in part by We and AI — sorting documented resistance into four overlapping modes: Resisting, Refusing, Reclaiming, and Reimagining. Tech Policy Press described the project as bringing together researchers, journalists, and critical scholars across seven time zones. We and AI's contribution connects directly to its standing research on AI inevitability narratives: the Countering AI Inevitability Framework operationalises its core theoretical claim that the current AI development trajectory is not natural or inevitable but is a product of specific choices that organised publics can contest.

Posture in the movement

We and AI occupies a distinctive position in the UK AI accountability landscape: it works at the narrative layer — the precondition for public mobilisation — rather than at the policy or litigation layer where most UK civil society AI-accountability work is concentrated. Its theory that mass public literacy is itself a form of movement infrastructure runs against the dominant logic of expert-to-policymaker pipeline advocacy. The Better Images of AI programme is the clearest expression of this: changing what AI looks like in the public mind, before a person has ever read a policy paper, shapes what they can imagine as possible or as contested. The Open Letter's emphasis on independence from commercial training resources — and its critique of the UK Government for contracting that function to tech companies — names the same structural problem: who controls the frame controls the debate.