AHEAD feature on the AI-literacy community guides (Festival of Libraries, June 2026)

PPIE: Eight pilot AI-literacy community guides, co-produced with Manchester communities were published and distributed through Chorlton Library as part of the Manchester City of Literature Festival of Libraries in June, and online via the AHEAD website.

Three of the guides speak directly to the fellowship's focus on AI-generated visual misinformation. These booklets grew out of a series of participatory PPIE workshops on AI Literacy and Visual AI Literacy that myself and the team at MMU’s DISC Digital Society, and AHEAD - Arts and Humanities Engagement and Dialogue, ran earlier in 2026 as part of the brilliant Critical AI Literacies Lab. Local communities told us what they actually needed to navigate AI-generated content, and we co-produced these guides in response, including me pulling together our notes from the workshop, together with non-AI royalty-free images in Canva.

The 8 booklets are currently being given out as physical resources in the library and across the Manchester community.

Two of them, "Is This Real? A community guide to understanding AI-generated images", and the other "They Don't Need Facts", speak directly to the heart of my Smart Data Research UK Fellowship, Synthetic Realities, which examines how AI-generated visual misinformation spreads and how communities can build resilience against it. The third "You Can Say No" shares community strategies for exercising the right to refuse AI and choosing traditional methods of communication and engagement instead. This work is the foundation for the next phase of community engagement in my Fellowship: later this year I'll be expanding it through further participatory workshops in Manchester, Liverpool and London, co-developing detection strategies with the communities most affected.

Pilot AI-literacy community guides, co-produced with Manchester communities