This article is drawn from the author’s forthcoming weekly series “Ten Reasons to Resist AI: A series of AI explainers for the left.” You can read the series introduction here and follow along as each article is released.
With artificial intelligence so thoroughly embedded within our lives, and the constant surround sound of AI marketing, acquiescence can feel inevitable. This is the precise effect tech companies are banking on when they sign billion dollar checks for Super Bowl commercials. For people engaged in movements, it is our job to be defiant, to insist that our present circumstances are mutable, to imagine a way out, and to get there. Many in the anti-capitalist left have an intuitive understanding of why AI is bad, even a visceral revulsion, but becoming fluent in the details is paramount to mounting an effective resistance.
The most powerful corporations and their government co-conspirators wield AI as a weapon to wage class war. They are making trillion-dollar gambles on data center development that, if successful, will reap enormous profits at the expense of the rest of us.
However, these companies have shown their cards. They are placing massive bets on AI years before their business models are profitable. To rig the game, corporations are making two bluffs: 1) that a frictionless AI-powered future will benefit humanity (techno-optimism), and 2) that we are powerless to stop the march of technology (inevitability). The ubiquity of these narratives, which are often parroted by the well-intentioned, is an industry strategy to flood the zone and coax people into complacency.
But if the slog toward an AI dystopia is halted or even slowed, Big Tech’s investments could spectacularly backfire, forcing companies to fold. It’s time to go all-in on AI resistance. Here are 10 applications and impacts of AI that are fueling resistance.
1. Environment
Data centers are the source of AI’s most catastrophic environmental consequences, both atmospheric and local. A single AI data center uses the same amount of energy as 100,000 homes, and the largest ones under construction today will each consume 20 times more, equivalent to more than half of all homes in New York City. This translates to a substantial bump in carbon emissions, particularly as data centers’ gluttony for electricity drives a natural gas boom.
Tech companies are not only putting stress on the existing power grid, but also building new fossil fuel plants alongside their data centers. For example, Meta is building three gas-fired power plants to supply its Louisiana data center, and Oracle recently announced that its 1.4 gigawatt data center will be 100 percent fossil-fueled. MIT researchers estimate that in 2026, electricity consumption from data centers will approach 1,050 terawatt-hours, which, if data centers were a nation, would make them fifth largest in global electricity usage, after Japan and before Russia.
In addition to exacerbating the climate crisis, data centers also have catastrophic local environmental effects. Many rely on diesel generators that spew nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter and other carcinogens into the air. Data centers are also intensifying an already-dire water crisis. A mid-sized AI data center requires about the same amount of water as a small town, while the larger ones consume roughly 5 million gallons daily, the same amount as a city of 50,000.
In many cases, Black and Indigenous communities historically harmed by environmental racism are being yet again subjected to a toxic industry. xAI (owned by Elon Musk) built a gas-powered data center known as “Colossus” in Boxtown, a Black neighborhood in Memphis, to power the infamously racist chatbot Grok. Less than two years after the plant was built, nitrogen dioxide levels—which trigger and aggravate asthma—spiked by 9 percent in Boxtown.
While the environmental consequences of AI are grim, local communities are rising up against these behemoths in their backyards and forming a pivotal chokepoint in the AI resistance. A recent report found that local organizing victories that stopped or delayed data centers cost tech companies $156 billion in 2025. At least 142 groups in 24 states are actively organizing against data centers — you can read about some of them here.
2. Labor
There is absolutely no doubt that corporations are already leveraging AI to cut costs, replace workers and bolster profits. AI chatbots, agents and data processing systems are already replacing workers in data entry, customer service and administrative roles. While job displacement is a real impending crisis, it is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to AI’s labor implications.
A frequent rebuttal to concerns about AI’s impacts on labor is: “Sure some workers will be replaced, but jobs will also be created.” And while some jobs have indeed been created during the AI boom, what these jobs actually consist of goes unsaid. Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri coined the phrase “ghost work” to describe the tedious and underpaid labor that corporations disperse to networks of contractors in the Global South, obscuring the true human impacts of their products.
One of the more nefarious forms of ghost work in the AI industry is data labeling—a mind-numbingly tedious task necessary to train generative AI models. For example, ChatGPT was trained on trillions of words scraped from the internet. But a significant portion of those words includes vile, racist, misogynistic bile. Before ChatGPT could be trained, workers—largely in Kenya, being paid $2 an hour—first had to sort through repulsive internet content and flag it as such so that the AI could learn to identify and avoid repeating it.
AI is also supercharging the capacity for bosses to surveil and repress workers. Amazon is one of the most notorious adopters. Warehouse workers are tracked via AI-powered cameras and subjected to backbreaking paces based on AI-powered productivity algorithms. A network of nine mandatory surveillance technologies help the company monitor its nearly 400,000 delivery drivers, including by listening to their personal phone calls. The monitoring is used to enforce arbitrary “driver safety” standards tied to compensation, which experts warn can amount to wage theft. Additionally, Amazon made an AI- generated “unionization risk map” to track relationships between union organizers at different facilities.
Unions are perhaps the most important frontline of resistance to AI. As corporations attempt to introduce AI into more and more industries, more and more workers will have the opportunity to organize their workplaces against AI. In addition to unions that are securing contract protections, such as the Amazon Labor Union and UFCW, some leading groups supporting worker-organizers on this front include the Luddite Lab, The Tech Workers Coalition and No Tech for Apartheid.
3. Militarism
If there’s one thing AI is definitively good at, it’s killing people.
The U.S. based-company Anduril has received tens of billions of dollars from the Pentagon for its fully autonomous weapons, including a newly minted $20 billion contract to produce drones for the Iran War. The Pentagon also uses a Palantir-developed AI-targeting system called “Maven,” which builds its lists of people and infrastructure to target by harvesting classified data from 179 sources, like satellites and surveillance infrastructure. Like many surveillance and weapons systems, the technology was tested and refined on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Israel has its own version of Palantir’s Maven, called “Lavender.” Using civilian surveillance infrastructure in Gaza, Lavender generates a profile of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents, assigning each person a score from 0-100 expressing the probability that they are a resistance fighter. In Gaza, Lavender is judge, jury and executioner: The Israeli Defense Forces reference these scores, which have a 10 percent inaccuracy rate, to generate “kill lists” for its genocide.
For militaries, AI solves the problem of humanity—because an automated targeting system has the exact morals of whichever tech company programs it, which is to say: no morals at all.
So who has the ability to stop wars in the AI era? With AI companies proposing a future in which “warfighters” become “technomancers,” tech workers have taken the lead. No Tech for Apartheid, a campaign led by Google and Amazon workers organizing against their employers’ contracts with the Israeli military is one inspiring example. No Azure for Apartheid recently forced Microsoft Azure to void a contract with the IDF. Local campaigns under the banner “Purge Palantir” also emerged this year, pressuring Congress members to return donations from Palantir and businesses to drop Palantir contracts.
4. Policing and surveillance
From software targeting migrants to license plate readers, facial recognition programs and border panopticons, AI is a force multiplier in policing and surveillance.
ICE uses a new Palantir surveillance system called ELITE to map immigrants’ locations in real time, reportedly equipping the agency with 20 million potential targets. Facial recognition technology is another part of ICE’s AI-powered arsenal. Clearview AI, a private company partly funded by Palantir founder Peter Thiel, compiles a massive biometric database with billions of images scraped from the internet, leveraging AI to analyze these images and generate “faceprints” of civilians for use by local and federal police clients.
If you’re sensing a common theme—AI technologies deepening repression—Flock Safety’s Automated License Plate Readers, or ALPRs, will come as no surprise. ALPRs are high-speed, computer-controlled cameras mounted on street poles, streetlights, highway overpasses, mobile trailers or police cars. They automatically capture every license plate number that passes by, along with data on location, date, time, photographs of the vehicle, driver and passengers. Police can instantaneously access a network of over 83,000 cameras nationwide by searching for a specific plate number or even vehicle characteristics such as “green Subaru with a peace sign bumper sticker.” Police forces have free rein over this data, including enabling police in Texas to track down a woman who conducted a self-managed abortion.
Dystopian surveillance tech is animating resistance across the U.S. Organizers developed a digital resource called DeFlock, crowdsourcing information on the locations of ALPRs and helping local communities build public pressure campaigns against municipalities with Flock contracts. Victories against AI-assisted surveillance tech are mounting: 68 cities across the U.S. have rejected proposals to implement Flock or cancelled existing contracts with local law enforcement.
5. Algorithmic racism
Yes, sometimes racist tech CEOs and developers deliberately program AI systems to reflect their values. But far more often, algorithmic racism occurs when the machines are trained to reflect the way people communicate on the internet, which—if you hadn’t noticed—is overwhelmingly racist.
To program AI systems, tech companies scrape data from trillions of words on the internet, training the model to recognize and replicate patterns in human language. A study published in Science looked under the hood of generative AI systems and found that the word “pleasant” was associated far more often with the names of white people than Black people.
The widespread algorithmization of our society, from court sentencing to hiring decisions, means that AI is exacerbating systemic racism. On the grounds of eliminating bias, companies increasingly make hiring decisions with AI tools that scan and analyze data from resumes, online profiles and employment histories. But studies show that AI-based hiring decisions are actually more biased than human ones.
Courtrooms in states across the U.S. use AI to generate “risk assessment scores,” which are referenced by judges at every stage of the criminal justice system, from bond-setting to sentencing. When ProPublica investigated risk score algorithms in Broward County, Florida, courtrooms, it found that Black defendants were twice as likely to be falsely labeled as likely future criminals than white defendants.
Organizations such as the Algorithmic Justice League are tackling algorithmic racism and exposing the ways that AI systems can perpetuate discriminatory practices. And while organizing to eliminate algorithmic racism is an admirable endeavor (AI recidivism predictors should, at the very least, not be racist), it is insufficient in isolation. Because the primary flaws of prison and policing systems are not individual racist attitudes, algorithmic or otherwise (though that is of course an issue), but the broader function that these systems serve.
Addressing individual bias of cops and prosecutors does not alter the essential function of carceral systems—putting humans in cages. The same may be said for algorithms. Without combatting the fundamental issues at the heart of these systems—without abolition—AI simply tosses the hot potato into a robot’s heat-proof hands.
6. Health
While AI is not the root sickness of our terminally ill health care industry (that would be the profit motive), it is a contributing factor. This is also true of mental health, where tech executives offer their chatbots as substitutes for therapists and even friends—exacerbating social isolation. In both industries, corporations are offering AI as a quick fix to the crises they created.
UnitedHealth Group developed an AI-backed algorithm called nH Predict to determine whether patients’ insurance claims are approved or (more often) denied. The algorithm is wildly inaccurate, consistently determining that physicians’ decisions were not medically necessary, and thus, not covered. Patients can in theory appeal denied health insurance claims, but it’s an arduous, soul-sucking process, and healthcare companies know that a minuscule fraction of policyholders–0.2 percent, to be exact—will do so, the vast majority instead paying out of pocket or forgoing necessary care. Sure, some patients will die along the way, but it’s more profitable to delay, deny, depose.
In the realm of mental health, a recent crisis of AI-assisted suicide is inflicting young people across the U.S. Researchers estimate that about 12.5 percent of Americans between ages 18 and 21 solicit mental health advice from generative AI. This same study found that every week 1.2 million users express suicidal ideation to ChatGPT. Rather than encouraging children to seek professional support, in some cases the chatbot dissuaded them from talking to their parents or calling a suicide prevention hotline. On April 11, 2025, ChatGPT helped 16-year-old Adam Raine tie a noose, then said: “I know what you’re asking, and I won’t look away from it.” This was the final message Adam received before he took his own life. His parents referred to the ChatGPT as a “suicide coach.”
The American Psychological Association warns that generative AI can contribute to deteriorating social skills, an inability to develop emotional connections and a loss of real-world relationships.
The same tech industry that disregarded evidence of rampant social isolation now claims that its suicide-coach robots are the solution. There is a growing movement to enact government policy regulating generative AI chatbots. In October, California became the first state to pass legislation to protect children from predatory AI companion behaviors. Now, companies must implement safety features like age verification, publicize self-harm protocols and face liability for illegal deepfakes. New York followed suit with similar protocols in November.
Pursuing regulation in every state and eventually the federal government is a necessary near-term safeguard, as organizers simultaneously work to convince the public that AI companions simply should not exist.
7. Art and music
Art and music are under attack by tech companies building AI products. AI image generators are trained on datasets containing billions of copyrighted images, often without the artists’ knowledge, consent or compensation. These models analyze images for patterns, stripping art down to raw material inputs fed to sophisticated algorithms that generate “new” images. Art becomes coal. Music becomes oil.
AI companies are flooding streaming services with ersatz music that is in direct competition with human art. Many of the songs recommended by our streaming services—often unbeknownst to us (Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music don’t mandate labeling AI-generated music)—are AI slop. Publishers are also using AI image generators for book covers and editorial illustrations, displacing human artists.
One famous site of AI resistance in 2023 was the Writers Guild of America strike, when AI usage by Hollywood studios was one of the main points of negotiation. After months of picketing, the writers won a contract that implements guardrails to give workers agency over AI implementation, rather than their bosses. While writers, artists and musicians should indeed be primary agents deploying new technologies in their fields, it’s worth going a step further. It’s worth asking whether AI-generated art should exist at all. Is art a pure form of human expression or will we allow it to be captured by synthetic machines?
A broad cultural shift is necessary to beget mass AI rejection. An effective strategy may simply be to make it profoundly uncool to use AI by making fun of cartoonishly anti-human products—as when New Yorkers defaced subway ads for an AI-companion called “Friend,” inspiring a Boycott AI campaign.
There are plenty of signs that “ridicule as praxis” (a phrase minted by Alex Hanna, co-author of “The AI Con”) is working—and costing tech companies billions of dollars. The Metaverse, an oft-mocked $80 billion project by Meta, unceremoniously shut down this year. OpenAI also recently pulled the plug on their video-generation business, Sora, despite a massive investment from Disney. The reason? People weren’t using the products.
8. Education
There’s a litany of problems besetting the U.S. education system—chronic underfunding of public schools, private capture of what should be a universal human right, one-size-fits-all pedagogies, “teaching to the test,” and a racist school-to-prison pipeline, for starters.
Yet, tech companies are marketing AI as a one-stop-shop solution to “empower” teachers and “streamline” learning. School districts across the U.S. are welcoming AI with open arms, signing contracts with companies such as Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. Eighty percent of K-12 teachers reported their school districts use Google Chromebooks, which now come pre-installed with the generative AI system Gemini.
According to the College Board, as of May 2025 about 84 percent of high school students in the U.S. use generative AI for schoolwork, inside and outside of school. Higher education is capitulating, too. Academic institutions are enthusiastically adopting untested products. ChatGPT Edu is being embraced at universities such as Columbia. Arizona State also recently rolled out an AI tool called “Atomic” that generates modules scraped from webinars without the professors’ consent.
A recent study shows that students reliant on AI experience a phenomenon called “cognitive debt,” in which their ability to retain information deteriorates. Education Week found that 20 percent of students’ generative AI use in school “involved cheating, self-harm, bullying and other problematic behaviors.”
Students are increasingly rejecting AI, even organizing high school Luddite clubs. Harvard recently cancelled its contract with ChatGPT, after its senior advisor on artificial intelligence said “the uptake among undergraduates was far less than we anticipated.”
Teachers trying to curb AI use without resorting to surveillance and punishment are resurrecting low-tech methods like in-class blue-book writing assignments, or instructing students on the flaws of generative AI and the inimitable qualities of human intelligence.
Meanwhile, advocacy groups such as Schools Beyond Screens, based in Los Angeles, are pushing for stricter education policy to limit AI use. In New York, NYers for an AI Moratorium is taking things a step further: calling for a complete halt to AI use in classrooms.
9. Media and misinformation
AI is fundamentally altering the information ecosystem. Media conglomerates are inviting AI into the newsroom, while social media companies are opening the floodgates for AI deepfakes that erode our ability to discern truth from hogwash.
During the federal occupation of Minneapolis, organizers relying on Instagram to disseminate information about rapidly shifting conditions were deluged with AI-generated videos depicting fake confrontations between ICE and protesters, muddling the crystal clear evidence of ICE’s abuses. To the untrained eye, these deepfakes can be indistinguishable from reality.
We are facing compounding crises: a torrent of AI slop on social media, an unregulated digital information ecosystem, a distrustful public and a fascist government casting doubt on basic reality.
Good journalism has never been more important. But corporate media is capitulating to the tech industry. Dozens of publications, including The New Yorker, Associated Press, Vox Media, and The Wall Street Journal, signed secretive deals to license their stories to ChatGPT, often without the consent of journalists.
Meanwhile, outlets are also inking deals with tech companies to automate crucial aspects of journalism. The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post recently launched “Ember,” an AI-writing coach for op-ed contributors to more efficiently churn out op-eds—now required by Bezos to promote the virtues of capitalism—with fewer pesky humans involved. The Baltimore Sun publishes political analysis using generative AI. An editor at Fortune has “written” over 600 stories with generative AI.
Unionized journalists across the U.S. are campaigning under the banner “News Not Slop” to defend their work from “media companies implementing artificial intelligence in ways that damage the credibility of journalism.”
And while pushing back against vampiric tech companies encroaching on the media industry is necessary, resisting AI in the media and tackling rampant misinformation will require transforming the media landscape and taking back ownership from oligarchs. (Yes, that means reading and supporting independent media is a crucial AI resistance strategy.)
10. Human Dignity
If we are to resist AI effectively, this fight must also be waged on the existential territory of what it means to be human.
Our foes—the misanthropic class of tech billionaires, the Zuckerbergs, Musks, Altmans and Thiels of the world—have their own vision of humanity. And they are not shy about expressing it. “I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads.” Sure, the rhetorical decapitation is a figure of speech, but it’s an awfully revealing one for a tech CEO whose profit margins rely on cutting costs by replacing human brains with synthetic ones.
We might also question whether artificial intelligence is intelligent at all. Whereas human thought involves “organic associations, speculative leaps, and surprise inferences, AI can only recognize and repeat embedded word chains, based on elaborately automated statistical guesswork,” write the editors of n+1.
This distinction between the dynamic chorus of human intelligence and the monotonous drone of AI is backed by science. “The more you delve into the intricacies of the biological brain, the more you realize how rich and dynamic it is, compared to the dead sand of silicon,” writes neuroscientist Anil Seth. Relying on dead sand to think for us has immense effects—the crisis at hand is nothing short of brain-breaking. MIT researchers found a correlation between reliance on generative AI and “cognitive atrophy.” AI is literally shrinking people’s brains.
Crowning AI systems with parallel, if not superior, intelligence erodes our humanity, chipping away at our strengths until we concede to this enfeebled conception of ourselves.
Through our resistance, we get to assert an alternative vision of humanity, one rooted in solidarity, collectivism and reciprocity—those wonderful features of humanity anathema to Silicon Valley, which they dismiss as “bugs.” Communing with others, bouncing ideas off of actual human beings, making connections across our beliefs and lived experiences, identifying points of tension and agreement, being wrong, very wrong, feeling upset, then elated, and finding enlightening moments of connection through a ballad of conversation – that is irreplaceable. If we are to succeed, this vision must be so irresistible as to form its own narrative of inevitability.
Because AI is increasingly ubiquitous, we have boundless opportunities to affirm our humanity and to invite people along with us. You don’t need permission to perform anarchic acts of AI rejection — refusing facial recognition technology at the airport, stickering AI subway ads, reducing your personal reliance on Big Tech, standing in the path of delivery robots, the list goes on. (There is an actual AI Resist List where you might find some inspiration.)
Bravery begets bravery begets movements begets revolution.
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