Call for Proposals

FF2025: AI Everywhere, All at Once 

AI4LAM’s annual conference, December 3 – 5, 2025, British Library, London 

The British Library and the Programme Committee for the Fantastic Futures 2025 conference are delighted to invite proposals for presentations and workshops for the Fantastic Futures 2025 conference.  

Submissions are invited 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. 

Key dates 

FF2025 Theme: AI Everywhere, All at Once 

We invite presentations on the theme of '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. 

Our 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. 

Themes   

We’re particularly interested in proposals that cover these themes:   

Formats for presentations (Thursday, Friday December 4-5) 

Formats for workshops or group sessions (Wednesday December 3) 

We value the interactions that an in-person event enables, so the default mode for this event is in-person presentations. However, if your proposal is accepted for inclusion in the conference but you are not able to travel to London, we can consider arrangements for making a virtual presentation on a case-by-case basis. Please contact the Programme Committee at FF2025@bl.uk to discuss. 

The conference will be held over three days: one day of workshops and other events, and two days of formal sessions. The social programme will include opportunities for informal networking.  

Plenary sessions on Thursday and Friday will be livestreamed, recorded and published. 

Find out more and get updates 

Further details about the conference submission process and registration will be supplied soon.