From a Morecambe tearoom to the bus shelters: Margaret Colling's campaign to get people talking about AI

The posters went up in April on bus stops in three areas, Sheffield, Plymouth, and Morecambe and Lancaster: comic strips about artificial intelligence, placed where people wait.

Putting them there was Margaret Colling’s idea. Colling, a retired librarian and grandmother of three from Morecambe, a seaside town in north-west England, is a leading champion of Let’s Talk AI, which the University of Sheffield calls the UK’s first community-designed AI awareness campaign.

“I wanted this campaign at bus stops because that’s where we can reach people - waiting for the bus, going about their lives. Not at conferences or on webinars.” — Margaret Colling, quoted by Beyond Radio

A panel of ordinary citizens

Colling came to the subject by chance. According to Beyond Radio, she was volunteering at a local tea shop when she found an opportunity to join a people’s panel on AI. Sheffield Digital reports that she had never used AI before she became involved.

The People’s Panel on AI met in London in early November 2023, alongside the UK Government’s AI Safety Summit. Its organiser, Connected by Data, says the members attended AI Fringe events, tried AI tools in small groups, talked one-to-one with scientists, then published recommendations to government, industry, civil society and academia.

Colling described the four days in a speech to the AI UK conference the following March. She had travelled down apprehensive. The setting felt alien, she said, full of talk of machine learning, algorithms and frontier AI. She thanked the team who, in her words, had taken the group “from ignorance to awareness”.

What she learned, Beyond Radio reports, opened her eyes: AI being used to make decisions about people’s benefits (welfare) and healthcare, scam emails becoming harder to spot, and her grandchildren using AI for schoolwork.

Stories, not webinars

Let’s Talk AI is the result. Dr Susan Oman, a senior lecturer at Sheffield, and her team spent six months running research and community workshops in the three areas. The characters and storylines were drawn directly from those conversations. The artist Kitty McEwan drew them as webtoons, comics that scroll vertically on a phone. The first three cover AI in the media, in everyday life and in schools.

“As a librarian I’ve always believed information should be for everyone, and right now when it comes to AI, it isn’t,” Colling said, in comments carried by The Star in Sheffield. The pilot runs in three locations; she would like to see it at bus stops across the country.

Why this matters

The gap Colling describes shows up in the numbers. A survey of 3,513 people, carried out by the National Centre for Social Research for the Ada Lovelace Institute and the Alan Turing Institute in October and November 2024, found that 61% had heard of large language models, the technology behind chatbots, and 40% had used one. But only 18% knew AI was being used in welfare assessments, and 24% knew it was used to decide eligibility for loans. And 72% supported laws to regulate AI.

Dr Oman’s argument is that official training misses most of those people. Government AI skills schemes, she said, concentrate on the workforce and schools, and offer nothing to encourage discussion and informed use among everyone else.

How to start

• Try it once, on something you know. Our guide to your first conversation with an AI assistant walks you through it.
• Look for a class. In Lincolnshire, Bernadette Jones, described by the county council as a retired learner, took a six-hour introductory course at Ermine Library and then used AI tools to support research for a housing appeal, which succeeded. “I now use AI in my everyday life. I am no longer afraid of it,” she told the county council. Ask your own public library what it offers.
• Keep two habits from day one. Check anything that matters against a second source, and keep names, account numbers and medical details out of what you type.
• Read around it. AI after 50: the complete guide covers the uses and the risks. The campaign has its own hub at letstalkai.org.uk.
• Then tell someone. A neighbour, a book group, a bus queue. That is the part Colling added.