{"slug": "the-ai-resist-list", "title": "The AI Resist List", "summary": "A coalition of AI researchers, journalists, and critical scholars has published \"The AI Resist List,\" a catalog of global movements resisting large-scale generative AI systems developed by companies they call \"empires.\" The list documents initiatives such as the \"Microslop\" campaign against Microsoft's AI outputs, Digital Independence Day workshops in Europe, and the Better Images of AI library, aiming to pressure the \"Pillars of Support\" that uphold what they describe as environmentally destructive and ideologically harmful AI development. The project centers on the assertion that the current trajectory of AI is not inevitable and seeks to empower individuals to shape an alternative future.", "body_md": "AI takes many forms. Like the word “transportation”, it refers to a collection of technologies as diverse and distinctive as bicycles to rockets. But today, one version of AI takes all the oxygen: large-scale, generative systems that power products like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT.\n\nThese systems consume an unfathomable amount of data, land, energy, labor, and water. They are rooted in profoundly disturbing ideologies that seek to flatten the world into a “one size fits all” abstraction and to replace humans with machines.\n\nWe call the companies leading this form of AI development “empires”. Under the guise of a civilizing mission to \"benefit all of humanity”, they use large-scale AI development as cover to consolidate resources, destroy ecosystems, centralize information, hollow out institutions, and gain paramount economic and political power.\n\nIt doesn’t have to be this way. As AI researchers, journalists, and critical scholars, we have built, documented, and imagined radical alternatives that do precisely the opposite: center community, celebrate human agency, honor local context and history, and rejuvenate the planet.\n\nNow people around the world are mobilizing to resist the empires of AI and to nourish visions of the future that work for all of us. Amid an onslaught of negative news, this project centers hope.\n\nWhat can I do to resist AI?\n\nNothing about the current trajectory of AI development is inevitable. It was shaped by the thousands of subjective decisions of a tiny elite, and continues its march based on the active participation and tacit consent of people globally.\n\nInspired by Choose Democracy’s Resist List against authoritarianism, we organized the AI resistance movements we documented based on how they pressure different “Pillars of Support” that uphold and perpetuate the empires.\n\nOur list is not meant to be comprehensive. Rather we selected a sample of movements to show different approaches to resistance and to illustrate how anyone can help shape the future of AI development.\n\nThroughout 2025, people started spreading the word \"Microslop\" to criticise the flood of low-quality outputs generated by Microsoft’s AI features. The term became viral when the company decided to ban its use on the Copilot Discord server, later on proceeding to shutting down the server itself. Specific initiatives also emerged from this frustration such as the website microslop.com which features a tracker documenting incidents of AI-generated content flooding the internet or corrupting the user experience.\n\nGlobalOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions\n\nDI.DAY - Digital Independence Day (#DIDit) is a European grassroots movement from Germany that promotes independence from Big Tech. To celebrate, they hold workshops across Germany and beyond on the first Sunday of every month to help people reclaim their digital lives, including on AI intervention in public life and how to switch to pro-democracy alternatives.\n\nEuropeSupport, build, and use alternatives to Big Tech tools\n\n“Meme-tivism: Rethinking AI’s Environmental Impact” is a series of hands-on participatory workshops, delivered to a range of public and private institutions, that asks its participants to explore the environmental impact of the AI industry through meme-making. Through humorous and creative participatory strategies, the project seeks to make such concerns more approachable and relatable, all the while contributing to a growing online library of memes.\n\nEuropeOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions\n\nBetter Images of AI is a global community image library and resource hub with a mission to improve the visual language that is used to communicate about and represent ‘AI’. They curate and maintain a free library of images that more accurately illustrate the capabilities, complexities, and impacts of AI systems, and the humans behind them.\n\nGlobalSupport, build, and use alternatives to Big Tech tools\n\nAlgorithmWatch provides a resource for anyone to report their experience of algorithmically facilitated injustice with the automated systems increasingly used to make important decisions, from evaluating job applications to \"predicting\" crime. By making these discriminary systems more visible, the organization seeks to raise public awareness and contribute to holding companies accountable.\n\nMedia Capture Watch is a granular interactive map displaying the over $1 billion of entanglements between a small handful of tech companies and journalism organizations. It seeks to expose the degree of the tech industry's influence, via an often opaque web of funding, on the very newsrooms meant to provide people with independent information.\n\nSurveillance Watch is a comprehensive database of the global surveillance and spyware industry. The platform’s interactive map exposes connections between the entities supplying, funding, and profiting off of surveillance technologies and their targeted deployment. The repository is community-driven and includes an API that anyone can use to build off of the data. A similar tool could be built to track AI industry funders.\n\nByteDance, TikTok's parent company, faced public backlash earlier this year after its new AI video-generation model SeeDance 2.0 was caught breaching user privacy. For example, in a video clip that went viral, a popular Chinese video blogger demonstrated how the AI model generated a video with his real voice when all he had uploaded was a self-portrait. After the wave of criticism, ByteDance temporarily suspended the portrait-uploading function in the software.\n\nNightshade is a tool that transforms images into \"poison\" samples, so that models training on them without consent will see their models learn unpredictable behaviors. It works by changing the composition of images in a way that is barely visible to the human eye, but completely changes how the image is interpreted by a generative AI model. Designed for artists to apply on their artworks before publishing them on the internet, Nightshade's goal is to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data such that licensing images from their creators becomes a viable alternative.\n\nIn 2023, a Chinese voice actress filed a lawsuit when she discovered a commercial AI voice generator had used her voice without her consent. After hearing the case -- the first of its kind in China involving AI-generated voices -- a Beijing court specialized in cyberspace issues ruled in the actress' favor. It ordered two parties to pay $34,000 in damages: the entertainment company that had hired the actress to record an audiobook and the software company that bought the data to train its AI model.\n\nMovimiento por un Uruguay Sustentable mobilized Uruguayans through a digital citizen campaign that seeked greater transparency and accountability for a proposed Google data center in Canelones, Uruguay. While the project was open for public comment, the campaign encouraged citizens to submit demands for more information and additional research about the facility, including its local socioeconomic benefits beyond the creation of 50 jobs, its impact on air quality, and investigations into how the upstream rare earth mining and downstream waste disposal caused by the facility would impact other communities.\n\nLATAMOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions\n\nThrough legal actions and letters, New Mexico residents and environmental groups are challenging \"Project Jupiter,\" a hyperscale data center planned near the southern New Mexico border as part of OpenAI's Stargate Initiative. Represented by the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, community members have sued the Doña Ana County Board of County Commissioners for its failure to comply with state public transparency laws, as well as for its decision to issue significant public financing for the project despite the environmental and public health risks.\n\nFriends of the Congo is an organization that partners with and elevates the stories of the Congolese people and their experiences with centuries of environmental racism and mass extraction. Today, AI and other technology industries rely on minerals found in the Congo: cobalt, gold, copper, and coltan - leading to inhumane and exploitative mining conditions. Friends of the Congo works with families seeking accountability from Big Tech over the death of children in cobalt mines, and has organized an annual Congo Week since 2008 to build global solidarity and awareness. Their work shines a light on the very human costs within digital technology supply chains.\n\nAfricaOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions\n\nIn the Philippines, several organizations representing digital workers have formed the Coalition of Digital Employees – Artificial Intelligence, or CODE AI, to address growing concerns over the impact of AI on labor rights. Led by BIEN, a network representing those employed in the business process outsourcing industry, the coalition pushes for more say in making AI policies, documents harms caused by AI adoption, and keeps employers accountable to those impacts.\n\nASIA/OCEANIAOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions\n\nTech Workers Coalition is a collective of workers in and around the tech industry, building worker power through self-organization and education. Working in solidarity with existing movements, they leverage their unique position within the tech machine to mobilize against issues spanning surveillance tech, ICE, and wage theft. They have also developed educational and operational resources for tech workers to organize their workplace against the negative impact of AI on tech workers, such as layoffs and deskilling (the process of devaluing the skill of a worker at the industry level), or on the rest of society, such as environmental impact, automated warfare, and increased surveillance.\n\nUS/CanadaEuropeOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions\n\nA union in Japan launched a petition against IBM regarding the technology conglomerate’s adoption of AI to help decide wages. The Japan Metal, Manufacturing, Information and Telecommunication Workers’ Union, or JMITU, cited invasion of privacy, discrimination, and automation bias as grounds for IBM to disclose the data used to train the system. In the petition, accepted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Labor Relations Commission, the union wrote, \"Humans place too much faith in decisions taken by AI.\" The case was resolved through reconciliation. which included agreements in favor of JMITU.\n\nKauna Ibrahim Malgwi, a former content moderator and licensed clinical psychologist, developed a proposal to offer sustainable mental health support to data workers. Drawing from her own experience and interviews she conducted with content moderators in Kenya, the plan blends psychotherapy, expressive arts, peer support, and community healing. A pilot is underway to support 20–50 workers, with the goal of creating a scalable model for long-term, structural care.\n\nAfricaOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions\n\nAs part of a historic 6.5 month strike, mental health professionals at Kaiser Permanente organized a five-day hunger strike to fight for the treatment of patients and staff as humans, not machines. They protested against the diminishment of health care into a factory-like assembly line, refusing the adoption of policies and technologies, including algorithmic triage and AI, that would degrade patient outcomes and working conditions. While the strike didn't center AI, it hit at the heart of the industry's imperial project: the desire to effectively render human and machine interchangeable. In California, their union is also advocating for a bill prohibiting individuals or companies, including those using AI, from offering or advertising therapy unless a licensed professional is responsible for the care.\n\nUS/CanadaOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions\n\nMore than 1,200 Amazon employees signed an open letter to their leadership to demand a responsible roll-out of AI. They sounded the alarm on how Amazon's aggressive new AI push was undermining the company's climate goals, while helping to build a more militarised surveillance state in the context of rising authoritarianism. The employees highlight three core demands to their management: (1) No AI with dirty energy, (2) No AI without employee voices and (3) No AI for violence, surveillance or mass deportation.\n\nUS/CanadaOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions\n\nThe Data Labelers Association (DLA) is dedicated to giving a collective voice to the often overlooked workers behind AI development. Founded by data labelers themselves, it advocates for fair working conditions, transparent contracts, and the recognition of the cognitive and emotional labor associated with labeling work. On top of awareness campaign and advocacy work, they offer mental health support and skills development resources to their members, now nearing 900 strong.\n\nAfricaOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions\n\nThe Worker Mobilizations Database is a tracker documenting strikes, protests, campaigns, mobilizations, and negotiations around the world in relation to AI among workers in the culture, arts, and media sectors. It is part of the Worker-Led AI Governance research project at the University of Toronto, which argues that workers can play an essential role in shaping AI development through collective organizing and contestation.\n\nGlobalOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions\n\nNo Palantir in the NHS is a grassroots campaign to remove Palantir Technologies from the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) data infrastructure. The movement is made up of workers, patients, and community members, who are demanding that the government cancels its NHS contract with Palantir, and that local NHS trusts do not adopt Palantir’s federal data platform.\n\nEuropeOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions\n\nSlow LLM is an internet browser plugin which slows down AI chatbots on a computer or network. Created by artist Sam Lavigne, it manipulates Javascript to stretch a chatbot’s response time to be excruciatingly long. It is meant to provoke people to think about their AI use and how algorithmic systems are shaping our lives.\n\nStudents, faculty, and staff at the University of Edinburgh circulated an open letter to pressure the institution to not renew its contract with OpenAI. The signatories argued that the contract violates the university’s AI Principles and its Responsible Procurement Policy, in particular due to OpenAI’s unethical labor practices and ChatGPT’s lack of security, transparency, and safety. Moving forward they recommended that the university’s AI system only include open-weight models.\n\nEuropeOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions\n\nFor a day, the people of Quilicura, Chile asked users around the world to submit prompts as they would a chatbot to Quili.ai, a website that instead connected their query to someone in the community. In collaboration with local artists, Quili.ai operated for 12 hours and answered 25,000 prompts from 68 countries. The goal of the project was to get people to question the mindless adoption of AI chatbots and highlight its environmental and public health harms--especially the exploitation of the Mapo River basin.\n\nLATAMOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions\n\ndecolonize.digital is a growing online collection of resources, created by technologist YK Hong, which includes guides to help people decenter Big Tech, build community, and protect their privacy. For example, a guide to \"De-Google Your Life\" offers alternatives to email providers, internet browsers, and productivity apps.\n\nUS/CanadaSupport, build, and use alternatives to Big Tech tools\n\nAt the South Island School in Hong Kong, students and teachers are experimenting with alternatives to Big Tech, spearheaded by the student Digital Leadership Council, which advises the school on its digital technologies. For example, instead of using Instagram, the Council is piloting a shift to Pixelfed, an open-source alternative.\n\nASIA/OCEANIASupport, build, and use alternatives to Big Tech tools\n\nThe Library of Babel is an online network of AI-critical educators working across tertiary, K-12 and community education, with members currently across Europe, Asia Pacific and the Americas. Members share strategies, resources, solidarity and support for opposing the integration of AI in teaching, academic work and educational governance.\n\nGlobalOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions\n\nTech Justice Law is a strategic litigation and advocacy organization that seeks justice for individuals and communities who have been harmed by tech products. In collaboration with other partners, they filed a series of lawsuits against Character AI, Google, and OpenAI, on behalf of people who experienced mental health harms and, in the worst cases, died by suicide, after using the companies' respective chatbots. The lawsuits have sparked a global public conversation and significant policy momentum over how to prevent such psychological harms.\n\nO Panóptico is a project that monitors facial recognition initiatives within the Brazilian public security system, and publishes the findings on an interactive map. It is run by the Centre for Security and Citizenship Studies, an academic institution dedicated to issues of violence and public safety in Brazil.\n\nThe Migration and Technology Monitor is a research archive, platform, and community that monitors the surveillance technologies, automation and AI used to screen, track and make decisions about people moving across borders. It incubates projects directly from affected communities, highlights impacts on people’s rights, and supports grassroots activism challenging border technology experiments.\n\nGlobalTrack industry abuse\n\nPossible Futures\n\nA better future is already being built. Countless alternatives exist, created by communities, organizations, and individuals around the world. We can build on these existing efforts to create a more just and sustainable future that we actually want to live in.\n\nHire a COOP is a campaign that promotes taking on the services of worker-owned businesses and platforms, shifting money away from an oligopoly-based market dominated by Big Tech into the solidarity economy. The campaign was launched in 2025 by the Argentine Federation of Technology, Innovation, and Knowledge Work Cooperatives (FACTTIC); the Worker-Owned Intersectional Platforms (WOIP); and seven tech, design, and creative co-ops owned and shaped by people in Brazil and Argentina which are self-managed and follow their own organizational principles based on democracy and intersectionality.\n\nHuniki is a thriving network of community-based technology companies that focus on the African languages often underserved by the AI industry. From machine translation to automatic speech recognition and custom modeling, their services provide tailored language AI systems developed by and for the people who actually speak it.\n\nThe Sovereign AI and Sustainable Computation for Indigenous Communities project is a creative solution to both repurpose functional yet discarded computational hardware, and strengthen Indigenous digital sovereignty. While companies like NVIDIA continually refresh hardware, they generate millions of GPUs that typically become E-waste. Professor Keolu Fox, the Native BioData Consortium, and Indigenous Futures Institute are taking these Zombie GPUs (ZGPUs) to create low-cost micro-data centers, which will be used to develop small, cheekily named Little Language Models (LLMs) within Indigenous communities. The models will be trained on culturally relevant and community-curated datasets, bridging a digital divide and creating an environmental solution.\n\nTe Hiku Media is a broadcasting and technology hub that has worked for over 30 years to nurture and revitalize te reo, the Māori language. While Silicon Valley's approach to AI mirrors colonial practices of assimilation and gatekeeping access, leaving out entire languages and peoples, Te Hiku Media had another vision. Working with the Māori community, they built a sovereign speech recognition model for te reo, while ensuring the flow of data wouldn’t be used without the community's consent. They've also developed a digital language platform, Papa Reo, to expand their work to other Pacific languages. As Te Hiku Media’s leaders Peter-Lucas Jones and Keoni Mahelona say, “Data is the last frontier of colonization.\"\n\nLesan AI starts from a simple premise: that everyone should be able to consume the internet in their own native language and have equal access to information, ultimately making society less vulnerable to fake news and misinformation. To that end, they have built state-of-the-art machine translation systems for Amharic and Tigrinya, languages in Ethiopia, training their models from scratch and fairly compensating their data workers. Their purpose-built systems show how machine translation can be done while centering both workers and the communities they serve.\n\nNonprofit AIxDESIGN's Slow AI project questions the narratives of big tech companies and their focus on scale and domination. Their exploration highlights the value of small-scale and human-centered approaches which honors each local context, culture, and environment. Their work culminates in a series of intricately beautiful and often whimsical zines: Small AI, Esoteric AI, and Ancestral AI - each offering alternative visions that push back on Silicon Valley ideologies.\n\nThe Africa Technology Assessment Platform (AfriTAP) is a decentralised pan-African network dedicated to empowering Africans to assert control over new and emerging technologies by conducting participatory technology assessments that prioritise community voices. To date, they have conducted assessments in several countries on the continent engaging indigenous people, farmers and local governments on the impacts of digitalisation and the costs borne by communities affected by mineral extraction.\n\nPermacomputing is a concept that reimagines the extractive, destructive relationship of the computing industry to people and the planet. Inspired by the ethos of permaculture in gardening and agriculture, permacomputing encourages a more sustainable, low-impact approach that seeks to maximize hardware lifespans, minimize energy use, and reuse computing infrastructures that are already available. A global, decentralized community of practitioners hosts meetups around the world and maintains a wiki for anyone interested in learning more or in starting their own initiative.\n\nGlobalReimagining, Resisting, Reclaiming\n\nWho built this\n\nWe would like to thank the following people for their contributions to this project: Jemima Gibbons, Sarah Ruth, Ismael Kherroubi Garcia, Dylan Orchard, Steph Wright, Harriet Humphries, Zofia Skassa, Aphie Gover, Elja Daae and Marc Goblot.\n\nHow did we build this?\n\nThe AI Resist List is a living project. This initial version was created between Oct 2025 and May 2026. Learn more about our methodology below.\n\nWe defined resistance broadly to encompass a wide range of practices, including:\n\nLegal challenges and strategic litigation\n\nCommunity organizing and grassroots campaigns\n\nTech worker refusal and non-compliance\n\nCounter-surveillance and digital self-defence\n\nArt, culture, and storytelling\n\nCommunity-controlled technology projects\n\nTechnical resistance such as encryption and alternative infrastructures\n\nResisting: Initiatives challenging the ideologies of extraction, datafication, and automation\n\nRefusing: Targeted responses such as boycotts of specific AI applications and uses\n\nReclaiming: Community control of technology design, development, and use\n\nReimagining: Collectively rethinking tech futures through environmental and decolonial lenses\n\nWe looked for examples around the world, while prioritizing the Global Majority, including Africa, Latin America, and Asia, where AI is often deployed with fewer safeguards and greater harm, and where some of the most creative and consequential resistance is already happening.\n\nOur team conducted a broad research sweep, drawing on civil society reports, local and regional media (including English, Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese sources), academic networks, and trusted referrals.\n\nAll initiatives were carefully reviewed and evaluated for inclusion with a view to providing a snapshot of genuine grassroots and community resistance across the world.\n\nBefore our project went public, we assessed whether featuring a group or initiative could expose people to retaliation, surveillance, or criminalization. We contacted every individual and group named on the list and carefully checked the language that describes their work for accuracy and safety. We only included those who wanted to be featured, with one exception where an individual could not be reached but details were well-documented in a lawsuit.\n\nThe version of the AI Resist List that you now see highlights dozens of initiatives and is intended as a journalistic and research attempt to document a representative snapshot of global resistance. Moving forward, the project will be maintained as a living resource for future work.\n\nFor media enquiries, to join the movement, share initiatives, discuss collaborations or just stay in touch please fill out this form.\n\nThanks to our partners\n\nThe AI Resist List was made possible through funding from Karen Hao and The Refugee Law Lab at York University, and in-kind support from the Distributed AI Research Institute and We and AI.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-ai-resist-list", "canonical_source": "https://airesistlist.org/", "published_at": "2026-05-28 19:22:03+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-28 19:32:21.474803+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "generative-ai", "ai-ethics", "ai-policy", "ai-research"], "entities": ["Claude", "Gemini", "ChatGPT"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-ai-resist-list", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-ai-resist-list.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-ai-resist-list.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-ai-resist-list.jsonld"}}