On 5 March 2026, while the European AI conference circuit geared up for a year of large-scale summits – from the World AI Cannes Festival to the AI Summit in London and the Rise of AI conference in Berlin – Manchester hosted something that couldn’t be more different in scale, and perhaps more significant in intention.
The AI Social Club Symposium brought 200 artists, filmmakers, researchers, and entrepreneurs to the Renold Building on the city’s Oxford Road corridor for a full-day reckoning with one of the most pressing questions in the creative industries: who controls authorship in the age of AI, and how do creators reclaim agency in an ecosystem that is moving faster than most can track?
The AI Social Club describes itself as a safe space for open dialogue about the positives and negatives of the AI revolution, free from sponsor influence and PR spin, a deliberate contrast to the enterprise-facing summits that dominate the European AI calendar. Events like the World AI Cannes Festival drew over 10,000 participants and 320 international speakers in February 2026, with programming spanning AI in business, climate technology, and ethics. The RAISE Summit in Paris, the World Summit AI in Amsterdam, and GITEX AI Europe in Berlin all place the emphasis firmly on ROI, regulation, and enterprise deployment. The AI Social Club Symposium occupied a different space entirely: community-rooted, creatively focused, and firmly rooted in the North of England.
Manchester was not an arbitrary choice of location. The event drew on the University of Manchester’s rich history of pioneering radical change, a city where the first stored-program computer ran in 1948, where independent culture has long had a habit of reshaping the mainstream, and where the creative and digital sectors are increasingly intertwined. The event was produced by Mark Ashmore FRSA of Future Artists and co-produced by Professor Anita Greenhill of the University of Manchester, and funded by the Hallsworth Conference Fund, giving the gathering both grassroots credibility and academic weight. As the event’s own framing put it, invoking the city’s most famous music impresario: “This is Manchester – we do things differently here.”
The programme reflected that ethos. Jon Howard from the BBC opened with a session on how generative AI is transforming public service media, addressing questions of creative trust and storytelling that have no easy answers. Lewis Hackett, R&D lead at Amazon-backed Showrunner, explored the prospect of audiences co-creating narrative worlds alongside AI platforms. Professor Greenhill and heritage expert Sens Sagna presented an AI storytelling pilot co-producing a digital retelling of a traditional West African heritage story, exploring how artificial intelligence can support, not replace, oral traditions.
The afternoon turned toward practice and provocation. Chris Hogg of Royal Holloway University applied forgotten Marshall McLuhan essays to the age of industrial creativity, offering a framework for protecting creative practice in an era of AI overwhelm. Klaire Tanner of AI Wales North and CreuTech argued that AI and XR can expand creativity rather than replace it, keeping human imagination at the centre. A session led by the co-founders of Manchester AI Café featured, among other things, Dr John O’Hare from DreamLab demonstrating Junkie Jarvis, a conversational AI agent running multi-user in augmented reality.
What distinguished the day was as much its format as its content. Rather than the broadcast model of most conferences, the Symposium was designed for genuine exchange, with breakout spaces, community WhatsApp groups ensuring connection before and after the event, and a format that positioned attendees rather than speakers as its centre of gravity.
The AI Social Club was founded by Mark Ashmore FRSA with the support of Associate Professor Anita Greenhill and Dr Kadja Manninen of Manchester Metropolitan University, positioned as a one-of-a-kind community space at the intersection of art, technology, and science, created to place Manchester and the North of England at the forefront of the AI revolution. The Symposium was the first time the community had gathered at this scale, and the sell-out attendance suggested the appetite for this kind of conversation was real and significant.
At a moment when the European AI event landscape is dominated by enterprise-scale gatherings debating regulation, ROI, and industrial deployment, the AI Social Club Symposium made the case that the most urgent conversations might be smaller, messier, and more human, and that Manchester was exactly the right place to have them.