AI warning projected onto Slough's cooling towers by campaign group Led By Donkeys

On Tuesday evening, 20 October, a giant projection warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence lit up the cooling towers on Slough's skyline.

The display started at about 7pm. Footage shared with UB1UB2 shows the faces of Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk on the towers. Other images included a nuclear explosion, the odds some experts give of AI going badly wrong, and a headline asking how real the prospect of killer robots is.

The campaign group Led By Donkeys later said the projection was its work. It released a film of the display, narrated by the broadcaster Gavin Esler, with the message that runaway AI threatens everyone and that keeping humanity in control should be a priority for all.

Why Slough

The choice of place was deliberate. Slough has one of the biggest data centre hubs in Europe, with more than 30 sites, and it is sometimes described as one of the largest in the world. Data centres are the large buildings full of servers that run the internet, cloud services and, more and more, AI systems.

The industry's growth in the town has led to pushback from some residents. A petition on Slough Borough Council's website calls for a pause on new data centre development. It cites worries about pressure on the electricity grid and the water supply, constant noise from cooling equipment and backup generators, and the loss of land that could be used for other development.

Residents have also raised heat and light pollution, and some say the town gets too little economic benefit back. Researchers have started looking at whether dense clusters of data centres make urban areas hotter during heatwaves.

This month the council has been encouraging data centre operators to put more money into local communities through a scheme it wants to develop with the companies. It has not yet said whether payments would be voluntary or how they would be worked out.

Meanwhile the government continues to back more data centre growth as part of its national plans, and campaigners in Slough say local voices are being ignored.

Warnings from within the industry

Some of the warnings in the projection come from inside the tech industry. In May 2023, Sam Altman was among hundreds of AI researchers and executives who signed a short public statement. It said reducing the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside pandemics and nuclear war.

Elon Musk has also warned for years about the dangers of advanced AI, and he still runs his own AI company. Critics of these warnings say they distract from the more immediate harms of the technology, such as its use of energy and water, its effect on jobs and the spread of misinformation.

Who are Led By Donkeys

Led By Donkeys was set up in December 2018 as an anti-Brexit campaign group and is known for large public stunts. In 2019 it projected a video onto the White Cliffs of Dover, and in the same year it projected a mocked-up mugshot of Boris Johnson, then prime minister, onto the Houses of Parliament.

More recently, in January 2025, the group projected an image of Elon Musk onto Tesla's factory near Berlin. It says all its work is paid for by public donations.

Neither the owners of the towers nor Slough Borough Council are known to have commented on Tuesday's projection. Projections like this usually last only a short time and leave no permanent mark on the building.