Recently, the ESRC Centre for Digital Futures at Work (Digit) and Better Images of AI ran a competition aimed at reimagining visual representations of digital transformations at work, including those driven by AI implementation. We received over 70 submissions to the competition from artists and creators from all around the world who created images that reflected the key themes from Digit’s research: digital adoption; digital inclusion; changing employment contracts and conditions; and digital dialogues.
When designing the competition, it was identified that the judging panel would need to reflect a range of disciplinary and experiential perspectives to meaningfully assess the strength of the submissions which engaged with the social, political, legal, and emotional dimensions of digital transformation of work. In several cases, this required judges to draw upon their own positionality and experiences as knowledgeable individuals in their field, but also as the very people who are situated within the systems and dynamics that the artworks sought to represent or critique. The judges included an international panel of artists, data scientists, sociologists, lawyers, business experts, trade unionists and policy advisors working on the cutting edge of AI.
In this blog post, we reflect on some of the choices that we made when we designed the ‘Digital Dialogues Art Competition’. We spotlight the panel of judges that came together to deliberate and score the entries into the competition. This blog post serves as a reminder of the importance of thoughtful and interdisciplinary judging panels, especially when the work being evaluated is as interpretive and subjective as visual imagery. We also highlight how projects like this can create space for new forms of conversation between disciplines, such as technology, marketing, and creative fields.
Who judges and why it matters
In any competition, judging is inevitably shaped by individual and disciplinary values. In recognition of this, we placed considerable emphasis on curating a judging panel that included a broad range of expertise and experience. The Digit team reached out to their existing multidisciplinary community fostered during the undertaking of the research to include artists, researchers and practitioners who are working at the intersections of technology, work, and society. The idea was to invite individuals who had different relationships to digital transformation at work, so that no single narrative or perspective would determine the judging.
To guide the process, we also developed a scoring framework that the judges used independently to score the images. The criteria were evenly weighted across four elements: visual impact, alignment with the brief, originality and creativity, and communication of the research themes. Scores were collated from the judges and presented during the deliberation session, allowing everyone to discuss the correlations shown in the rankings of the images that were scored in advance.
It was interesting to see how the conversations between the judges also raised deeper questions that reflect the epistemic tensions between different kinds of knowledge and disciplines. A salient example of this emerged in the panel’s conversation around one submission, “Wheel of Progress” which is shown below. The judges wrangled with the question: does the abstraction of an image obscure communication, or does it open space for interpretation and imagination about the image’s theme?
Image credit: ‘Wheel of Progress’ by Leo Lau*
Jacqueline O’Reilly (Co-Director of Digit) reflected on the importance of having a range of images, some that might be more literal and some that require deeper interpretation to appeal to all audiences. Michael Luck (Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex) welcomed the ambiguity of the image, noting: “I like having to think and to look and to try and work out what’s going on in this”. Another judge, Nick Scott (Head of the Centre for Responsible Union AI) offered a nuanced view, appreciating the layered nature of the piece: “Yes, it is abstract. Yes, it is a bit more artistic. But actually, once you see it – and ‘get it’ – it is telling a very clear story”.
“Wheel of Progress” demonstrates the nuances of judging visual arts. Better Images of AI is focussed on reimagining images which often requires us to step outside familiar stereotypes, engage with complexity, and explore the different ways that the impacts of AI can be seen, felt, and understood.
Our judging panel and their reflections
The judging panel was composed of scholars, practitioners, artists, and individuals whose knowledge spanned art, AI, law, labour, and marketing. For many of the judges, the experience of participating in the competition was beneficial and offered a space to engage with research through visual means.
Several of the judges’ conversations during the panel also showed how the judging process prompted them to reflect on their own assumptions: asking whose experiences of digital transformation are prioritised and how visuals can challenge or reinforce dominant narratives. For artists on the panel, the dialogue with scholars and practitioners also offered a chance to see how their own creative methodologies could be expanded or recontextualised to reveal or reframe dimensions of research that are often overlooked.
Below, we include short bios of each judge, alongside selected reflections on the value they found in the competition and the reasoning behind their decision to engage with the Digital Dialogues Art Competition.
Chanell Daniels
Chanell is the Responsible Technology Innovation Manager at Digital Catapult and Visiting Policy Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. She was previously a Senior Manager in Community Safety at Depop and currently sits as an AI Advisory Board Member for OpenUK.
“With these images, there is an interesting ability to capture nuanced considerations and problems with AI use that can be very difficult to translate into text. This could be applied with how companies and their employees or other stakeholders are able to communicate the impact of digital transformation changes and the concerns that may arise.”
Nick Scott
Nick brings over 20 years as a digital leader spanning non-profit, trade union and research organisations. At Unions 21 he heads up the Centre for Responsible Union AI, which has been set up to help unions navigate the impact AI and emerging technologies have on their staff, operations, members and mission.
“The union movement is rightly very focused on supporting workers through the impact of AI, from job changes to developments like algorithmic management. We’re looking at the other side – what are the challenges, but also the opportunities, for unions as organisations from AI? How can we manage AI to build union strength when it is most needed?”
Niels Bonde
Niels is a digital artist and his PhD research at the University of Applied Arts Vienna is on facial recognition. Niels’ work has been shown in installations in museums and galleries such as Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston, ZKM Karlsruhe, PS1 MoMa New York, Malmö Kunstmuseum, Statens Museum for Kunst Copenhagen, Academy of Fine Arts Hanoi Vietnam, and Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius Lithuania.
“AI-generated images now have become much more convincing, and as a consequence of that we see a deluge of AI-slop where the content is generated by Chat GPT and friends’ harvesting of images coming from similar sources, generating similar content. This is in particular an issue in illustration, as this competition addresses. As a few prompts quickly generate enormous amounts of derivative images, it is important to support and promote original content made by artists.”
Bhumika Billa
Bhumika is a PhD student at Cambridge Faculty of Law, Trust scholar, and Research Associate at the Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge. Bhumika is also an award-winning poet, dancer, and filmmaker – her work has been featured by various organisations including Button Poetry, BBC Words First, Southbank Centre, Apples & Snakes, UniSlam, and Harvard University.
“This was the first time I was exploring how we are translating AI through art because so far I’ve only thought about how AI has been translating us in my research. I think it’s really important to look at that reflexivity.”
Jacqueline O’Reilly
Jacqueline is the Co-Director for the ESRC Centre for Digital Futures at Work (Digit) and Professor of Comparative Human Resource Management at the University of Sussex Business School. Jacqueline was awarded a Jean Monnet Research Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence and appointed Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) in 2019.
“It has been a great experimental vehicle to communicate the academic evidence from our research to the broadest audience. We hope this will ignite further discussions about these emerging trends.”
Michael Luck
Michael is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Provost at the University of Sussex. Previously, he was founding Director of King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Director of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Safe and Trusted AI.
“The tone of the conversation that we have in general in the press is just not good enough. I think that having appropriate representations and thinking about the implications of AI is critical for the future.”
Tania Duarte
Tania is the Founder of We and AI, a UK non-profit focusing on facilitating critical thinking and more inclusive decision making about AI through AI literacy. Their programmes include the Better Images of AI collaboration with BBC R&D and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.
“The competition entries as a whole were wonderful in terms of the diversity of medium, style, and conceptual approach. At a time when so much visual content online seems to be so uniformly stylised and bland, to see illustrations, collages, digital art, cartoons, watercolours tell such different stories in provocative and intriguing ways is refreshing. I particularly enjoyed the creation or depiction of some new metaphors of AI that are far closer to the bone than ones we typically see.”
Ben Wodecki
Ben is an accomplished technology journalist with an established track record reporting on cutting-edge developments in AI, emerging tech, data centres, networking, and innovation law. He was named among MVPR’s top 18 journalists writing about AI in 2024 and has previously written for AI Business, The AI Journal, and Capacity Media.
Rob Keery
Rob is the CMO at Anything is Possible and Jagged Edge AI. Rob loves connecting with bold brands and getting under the skin of their media, tech and creative challenges – then turning them into effective growth.
“Day to day it’s challenging to communicate about AI with people whose knowledge is mediated through tech-sector boosterism or media fearmongering. In the blink of an eye AI has gone from superstructure to infrastructure, creating an urgent need to develop more nuanced tools to help people understand the way AI tech is changing their lives and work.
“If AI is going to fundamentally restructure work and the economy, our home lives and our interactions with online spaces, and that ‘if’ is getting smaller every day, then people need to have a voice to exercise their control and autonomy over the pace and nature of that change. But that voice is impossible without language, and people do not have that language for understanding the role of AI in their lives – so creating new models to think with is a project that deserves our sustained attention and input.”
Maninder Paul
Maninder is LinkedIn’s Top Digital Strategy Voice 2024, a seasoned B2B marketing strategist with 15+ years of experience in digital marketing and AI-driven transformation for global tech brands like Accenture and Adobe.
“As a senior marketer, I know the power of visuals in shaping brand perception and storytelling – especially in B2B. Images don’t just support a message; they are the message. I was honoured to serve as a judge for Better Images in AI – an initiative that encourages us to critically examine how AI is influencing culture.
AI can now produce images at scale, but speed and scale don’t always translate to quality or relevance. Too often, we see outputs that reflect embedded biases – falling into stereotypes, missing details, and offering a one-sided view.Whether it’s gender, race, age, or profession, these visual shortcuts can unintentionally reinforce exclusion. We’re at a pivotal moment. If we’re intentional, we can tap into AI to create visual narratives that truly reflect the diversity of the world we’re speaking to.”
By bringing people together from diverse disciplines, it was acknowledged that each judge came with their own ways of seeing, interpreting, and engaging with visual works. Their reflections as judges, but also people who regularly communicate about and engage with AI, remind us about the role that visual communication plays in shaping public understandings of technological change.
The deliberations between the judges also show how visuals serve an important role to complicate narratives, invite reimagining, and open up seemingly complex ideas to wider audiences. We hope that the “Digital Dialogues Art Competition” inspires others to think creatively about how academic research can be visualised, and to see the act of judging as a meaningful opportunity to share knowledge and reflect on differences.
*While the original “Wheel of Progress” submission sparked rich discussion among the judges for its abstract and interpretive qualities, a simpler, more accessible version of the image has since been added to the Better Images of AI library which you can see here. The library is designed to function as an alternative to traditional stock imagery by providing clear visuals for public communication about AI so a variation of this image was added and can be downloaded for free under a CCBY-4.0 license.
Cover image attribution: Julieta Longo & Digit / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
