Generative AI – artificial intelligence with the ability to produce text, images, music and video – has taken the world by storm. At Nesta, we’ve been trialling AI tools like ChatGPT to better understand their potential impact on our day-to-day operations.

Now, we’re diving deeper to find impactful use cases of generative AI in sectors directly linked to Nesta’s three missions in education, health and sustainability. Can this new technology support nurseries or home learning environments in some way? Can generative AI help the low-carbon heating sector become more productive? Does its use for food marketing purposes pose a risk to our food environments?

What will we do?

Our project will progress in two stages: discovering and prototyping.

First, we'll carry out user research with people working in the mission domains, such as nursery workers, early years teachers, educational content creators and caregivers. We’ll also continue our research efforts by scanning academic literature and news and talking with generative AI experts to deepen our understanding of the emerging applications and risks of this technology.

At the end of the discovering stage, we hope to have surfaced a large set of use-case ideas and consequences directly relevant to Nesta’s missions (with a particular focus on the fairer start mission). We also expect that we’ll identify and test many uses for our own day-to-day research and admin work as part of this project.

We'll then select and develop a set of prototypes of use cases directly related to Nesta’s missions. We define ‘prototype’ to mean a broad range of things: it could be a process, a way of working, code, or a web app. To aid us in this process, we have also released an open call for a generative AI resident to join Nesta to help us explore this technology. In addition, we aim to host a 'hackathon' focused on using generative AI for social good towards the end of summer.

Fundamentally, having a prototyping work strand reflects our view that we need to do hands-on work to fully appreciate the potential impact of generative AI. We hope that our prototypes will offer opportunities for impact right now and point to potentially bigger changes in the future.