AI > Generative AI: Do you Trust it?

Event summary

Raising awareness of, and promoting, the SPRITE+ project was the main purpose of the ‘AI > Generative AI: Do we trust it?’. The SPRITE+ event grant offered a great opportunity for Sprite+ members and interested individuals from members of the public and in academia to gather and discuss some latest issues in security, privacy, identity and trust in generative AI, including the effect of its usage on the brain (following Kosmyna et al.’s 2025 study: [2506.08872] Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task).

Highlights

By including different voices, including members of the general public, school-teachers, students, academics, and SMEs, a Sprite+ special hybrid event, organised by Dr. Huma Shah in the School of Science at Coventry University, on Saturday 25 October 2025, in the 75th anniversary year of the publication of seminal paper, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, facilitated discussions on trust, intellectual property, and societal impact of Generative AI. Opening with a keynote by Phil D. Hall, founder of conversational AI company Elzware Ltd., the SPRITE+ event also featured two break-out sessions on Generative AI for Schools, and in Higher Education. The day closed with a dialogue between attendees during a panel session on trust in the current slew of Generative AI tools.

A poll taken during the panel session showed attendees were fully aware of the faults in these nascent AI digital assistants; they did not fully trust the output. The need for AI literacy was emphasised, which highlighted that attendees did not consider Generative AI as ‘true intelligence’. The outputs from Generative AI were understood to be the summation of aggregated human creativity and imagination captured from all over the internet.

SPRITE+ events like the special Turing 75 ‘AI > Generative AI: Do you Trust it?’ show how SPRITE+ encourages open debate on issues such as data privacy, sustainability, trust in emerging technologies, creativity and copyright, while exploring practical applications, such as in education and healthcare. SPRITE+'s inclusive approach helps to demystify AI and raises awareness of responsibility in usage. When we are experiencing a rapid change where companies are moving to AI agents with less graduate jobs available, SPRITE+ serves as a safe conversational space building trust between educators and students, as well as fostering dialogue between academics and non-academics to better understand the impact of Generative AI, and how our voices can contribute to ethical development of AI.

Lessons learnt

1. The success of the special Turing75 ‘AI > Generative AI: Do you Trust it?’ event, in spreading the word and raising awareness about the SPRITE+ project, was demonstrated in the number of times SPRITE+ was tagged on social media (including LinkedIn), following a post after the event;

2. AI literacy, beyond digital skills, needs to be incorporated into adult informal training in the workplace, as well as in schools, colleges and universities;

3. Public interest in ‘AI and Generative AI’ demonstrates more public dialogues are needed on privacy, identity, security and trust in AI, and that an AI-related hybrid event can be organised at short notice (notice of Sprite+ award 09/09/25 with deadline of 01/01/26).

4. Hybrid sessions really need high-end conference facilities to allow full-benefit for online participants. Such conference facilities are very expensive, not affordable within a grant of £1500. Regardless, the event was a success with participants fully engaged appreciating Phil D. Hall’s keynote, sharing their experiences in the panel Q/A and their perspective on ‘Trust in generative AI’ in an event poll.

Outcomes/outputs

The first main outcome from organising the event was an invitation extended to Dr. Huma Shah to deliver a keynote on AI to the general public on Saturday 1st November 2025, for Aston University Cyber Security Innovation Research Centre: Posts | LinkedIn in their Knowledge Café: Exploring AI and Everyday Working Lives. This was held in a community café in Birmingham.

Expected outcomes include analysis of perspectives on ‘Trust in generative AI’ from this and the previous Sprite+ supported events held in the School of Science, Coventry University in May and June 2025. The analysis is expected to be submitted for peer-review in appropriate journals (e.g., Computers in Human Behavior).