From advocating for the protection of creative rights amid the rise of generative AI, to developing deepfake detector tools and creating medical robots that can respond to the needs of diverse communities; over the past two years the BRAID fellowship programme has helped shape how the UK thinks about, develops and governs AI. Working across multiple sectors including the creative industries, cultural heritage, healthcare, public media and energy, BRAID Fellows have used their arts and humanities expertise to guide the delivery of responsible AI. Their work has shaped debates on responsible innovation, influenced how organisations work with AI, and helped ensure that workers and underrepresented communities are included in conversations about emerging technologies.
Cross-sector collaboration and impact
Through funding from the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council and working in partnership with major corporations like Microsoft Research and Adobe, public institutions such as Ofsted and Arts Council England, advocacy bodies like the Public Media Alliance, start-ups like DataMind Audio, and cultural organisations including Serpentine Galleries, the fellowships cover an ambitious portfolio of projects and areas of activities. Through partnership working and knowledge exchange, fellows and their partners work to develop responsible AI research, tools, methods and public-facing activities with benefits that extend beyond academia and into policy, industry and public discourse.
The impact of this programme can be seen though outputs from the fellowship cohort including the adoption of publicly available toolkits, guidelines and industry reports, national and international media coverage and public events that have deepened engagement and understanding of responsible AI and its impact on communities. BRAID Fellows have influenced governance and engaged directly with policy and parliamentary processes, securing citations in Hansard, arranging policy roundtables, and making contributions to policy briefings.
AHRC Executive Chair Professor Christopher Smith said:
“BRAID is playing a vital role in ensuring the UK is AI-ready by informing policy and practice across sectors such as the creative industries, healthcare and energy.
“From deepfake detection to the ethical use of AI in areas as diverse as content creation and renewable energy, this renewed funding will ensure that BRAID continues to shape our responsible adoption of this transformative technology.”
Professor Ewa Luger, Co-Director, BRAID said:
“The BRAID Fellows have come together as a national network of experts capable of bridging technical innovation and societal understanding in ways that have demonstrably enhanced responsible AI approaches and practices. Not only have they moved the needle on responsible AI, but they have shown that Arts and Humanities insights are more than simply a ‘nice to have’ within AI innovation and adoption, they are in fact essential.”
Over the past year, the BRAID programme team has worked with fellows and collaborators to reflect on progress and discuss opportunities to develop and extend partnerships. Arising from these discussions, we are delighted to announce that nine projects will receive funded extensions to expand the scope of activities, deepen collaborations, and deliver further research, engagement, and real-world impact.
The projects receiving additional funding include:
Generative AI, copyright and the future of publishing: Dr Clementine Collett’s research on the impact of Generative AI on the publishing industry
In November 2025, Dr Clementine Collett (University of Cambridge) released her report on the Impact of Generative AI on the Novel. This urgent piece of research exploring how practitioners across the publishing ecosystem, from novelists and editors to agents and publishers, are experiencing and responding to the rapid rise of generative AI sparked national conversation, receiving wide-ranging media coverage across broadcast, print and online outlets. Dr Collett presented her research within Parliament, where she facilitated discussion on AI and copyright between creatives and policymakers. The recommendations from her report were put forward in December 2025 by Chris Evans MP in a House of Commons debate on AI Safety. Her extended project will continue her collaboration with the Institute for the Future of Work (IFOW) and the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy (MCTD) at the University of Cambridge, mapping the licensing ecosystem across the creative industries and working to co-design technical solutions to responsible licensing of creative content for AI use by integrating the voice of creative workers.
Maintaining trust and integrity: Professor Nick Bryan-Kinns’s work on deepfake detection for public media
As part of his fellowship project Professor Nick Bryan-Kinns (University of the Arts, London) worked with the BBC AI team on the proof-of-concept designs of their AI deepfake image detector tool. Utilising arts and humanities methodologies, Professor Bryan-Kinns specifically examined how this tool could be made more user-friendly for BBC journalists and contributed to beta testing and evaluation of the early-stage prototypes. He also developed a case study of the value that BBC journalists see the deepfake detector tool bringing to the BBC amid the challenges faced by the influx of AI content. Through the extension of his Fellowship, Professor Bryan-Kinns will contribute to the development of the proof-of-concept into a robust AI deepfake detector tool deployed across the BBC, working to embed responsible AI principles in the tool itself and accompanying training materials.
Transparency and values-led governance: Dr Oonagh Murphy’s framework for Responsible AI in the Cultural Sector
Dr Oonagh Murphy (Goldsmiths) worked in partnership with Arts Council England to develop responsible AI governance and shape the organisations sector development strategy to support the cultural sector engage with the impact of AI technologies in operational and creative practices. This collaboration helped shape a new organisation-wide AI policy for Arts Council England’s 700 staff and led to the announcement that AI will not influence decision-making in its annual £600 million grant funding programme. The Responsible AI Practical Toolkit has also been made available for other organisations looking to develop their own AI policies and has other institutions have already begun to engage it, including the Royal Academy of Arts, The V&A, Wildlife Trusts, MUNCH, Creative Scotland, Arts Council of Wales. This work represented an important step towards transparent and values-led AI governance in the cultural sector, helping to safeguard fairness, accountability and public trust across decision-making processes. As part of her costed extension Dr Murphy will work with the Arts Council England to establish a new national Responsible AI Cultural Leaders Academy.
The full list of awardees is as follows:
Professor Nick Bryan-Kinns
With the support of the BBC, Nick Bryan-Kinns will support co-designing the development of a deepfake AI detector user interface from proof-of-concept through to deployment, working to embed responsible AI principles and developing accompanying training materials.
Dr Clementine Collett
Dr Collett’s research will focus on socio-technical solutions to ethical and responsible licensing of creative content for AI training. This project will work with representatives across the creative industries to map current and potential licensing structures, focusing on what we know creatives want from these licenses as found in previous research. This project is partnered with the Institute for the Future of Work (IFOW) and the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy (MCTD) at the University of Cambridge.
Dr Federica Lucivero
With the support of the Ada Lovelace Institute and Nuffield Council of Bioethics, Federica Lucivero, will run a series of experimental engagements in the public sector on AI in research, data centres and health tech, exploring ways to embed ethical reflection and moral imagination into work on AI governance.
Dr Caterina Moruzzi
CREA‑TEC has shown how generative AI is already changing creative practice, shaping skills, authorship, trust, and the choices creators make. Caterina Moruzzi’s research will turn those insights into practical public resources and add new research on provenance tool’s research (labels and records that show where digital content comes from and how it was made) studying, with Adobe and the wider content-authenticity community, how these tools affect real creative behaviour. The outputs will include accessible resources such as co-authored reports for industry and policymakers, a methods handbook, an illustrated chapbook, and public events in Edinburgh, helping move the discussion of creative AI beyond specialist circles and into wider public and professional use.
Dr Oonagh Murphy
Dr Oonagh Murphy will work with Arts Council England to establish a new national Responsible AI Cultural Leaders Academy. The academy will provide intensive futures focussed training for cultural leaders and empower creative practitioners to become advocates for responsible engagement with AI tech.
Dr Martin Parker
The extension to Machining Sonic Identities enables Datamind Audio Ltd. and Dr Martin Parker to share their work with a wider community of composers. Together they will be supporting three new commissions for emerging composers of electronic music. The composers will have full access to Datamind’s software suite and a new platform which enables AI models of their music to be explored through the sensors on a mobile phone. Imagine adaptive and flexible musical forms where the listener is also the performer.
Dr Kyrill Popapov
Dr Kyrill Popapov’s project will work with local authorities, community energy organisations and residents to co-design a Responsible AI-in-Energy Toolkit supporting fair and transparent use of AI in renewable energy and retrofit systems. Through interviews, workshops and policy engagement, the project will explore how AI can support energy transition in ways that are participatory, socially accountable, and responsive to energy poverty and surveillance concerns.
Dr Alex Taylor
Alex Taylor’s extension involves expanding the focus of research from the hidden labours of AI to the material infrastructures and capital investment being pursued to make AI happen. The first stages of his fellowship examined AI’s dependence on a globally distributed supply chain of outsourced human labour—a labour that sheds a different light on the hyped stories of innovation concentrated in Silicon Valley and the spectacle of computation supplanting human capability. The extension to the fellowship establishes the ground for further research into the ‘muted registers of AI’, shifting attention from labour to the infrastructural and capital growth now in full swing to expand the reach and material presence of big tech and AI, worldwide.
Dr Paula Westberger
The next phase of Dr Paula Westberger’s fellowship focuses on the development of a Responsible AI Governance Toolkit specifically designed for heritage and heritage science organisations. The Toolkit will address current gaps in capacity to engage with AI governance, particularly in relation to intellectual property and associated human rights, including Indigenous and community rights. It will also address tensions between open access, commercial AI scraping and income generation for non-profit heritage organisations. This project will see Dr Westberger work with the Heritage AI and Law (HAIL) Network.
