resist ai actions

While big tech has been strategically investing to promote a positive narrative around AI, many rapidly expanding global networks of people and communities are resisting AI tools, writes Jennie C Stephens

Sign our open letter below to tell Amazon leadership that we need a more responsible rollout of AI. Every single signature makes our message stronger.

Courtney Radsch discusses rehabilitating the idea of Luddites as people concerned with the control and impact of technology.

"Ok I know about all these harms of generative AI. But what about when their coding tools are actually useful? I built this amazing thing that wouldn't have existed otherwise, what do you think about that?" I have had this exact exchange with a lot of socially-aware, activist-ey engineers and hobbyist coders lately, and I've been thinking about it a lot. My first question is usually, "*is* it actually useful?", because in a lot of situations (especially large-scale, production code), more and more people are reporting that they only appear to increase productivity, and that these tools are wreaking havoc on their codebases. But there are certain cases—often around prototyping, hobby projects, solo-developer stuff— where it's clear that someone created something cool or useful they would not have created otherwise using a generative AI coding tool. I won't argue with that. These conversations can lead into a kind of "what if I used Claude Code and it cured cancer, hmm?" dynamic. And I think I finally have a response: I'm not here to adjudicate who is, like, going to AI Ethics Heaven. I can't stop you. But if you care about these issues— the destructive data centers, the exploitative content moderation, the theft of our data— what is your piece of the work in fighting that? I think refusal can be a really meaningful and impactful piece of the work. You can look at the harms and decide not to engage, on principle. You can organize with coworkers to negotiate collective refusal. That really does have an impact. But maybe refusal isn't your piece of the work— maybe you'll be fired if you don't use these tools (or you're dead certain Claude Code will cure cancer)— okay! Are you supporting data center protests? Fighting for legislation? Raising awareness about data worker organizing? Maybe researching smaller local models you can run on your own hardware? There's a lot you can do to fight the harmful impacts of large-scale generative AI (this is why we compiled The Resist List*, after all). Find your piece of the work, and go do that. *https://airesistlist.org/ | 12 comments on LinkedIn

Across red states and blue, a grassroots movement is pushing back on the unchecked growth of the artificial intelligence industry.

Website operators are being asked to feed LLM crawlers poisoned data by a project called Poison Fountain. The project page links to URLs which pro…

In the race to develop artificial intelligence, tech giants are building data centers that guzzle up water. That has led to problems for people who live nearby.