Sam Illingworth, PhD

Full Professor of Creative Pedagogies, Edinburgh Napier University
Visiting Professor, University College Dublin
Founder, Slow AI (theslowai.substack.com)

Sam Illingworth is a Full Professor of Creative Pedagogies at Edinburgh Napier University and the founder of Slow AI, a critical AI literacy newsletter and 12-month curriculum with 8,000+ subscribers. He advises the Council of Europe on AI literacy for human rights and democracy, and has given expert evidence to the European Commission, UK Parliament, and House of Lords.

His research investigates how people interact with generative AI systems, with current work funded by the Leverhulme Trust. He is the author of 10 books, including Generative AI in Higher Education (Bloomsbury, 2026) and Effective Science Communication (IOP Publishing), which is used in 523 institutions across 66 countries.

Sam designs interactive applications that train users in AI output evaluation, including Bot or Not (a Turing test variant), Dead Reference (a hallucination detection trainer), and Good Employee (an AI compliance satire). He also created the Integrity Debt Audit, a tool measuring the gap between what organisations say about AI and what they do.

He is a published poet, with work performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company and at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. He has been featured by BBC, NPR, Wired, Buzzfeed, Nature, and Scientific American, with a media reach of 400 million over the past two years.

Contact: s.illingworth@napier.ac.uk | sam.illingworth@gmail.com
Web: samillingworth.com
Google Scholar: scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=R_m3nH0AAAAJ