The AI Resist List (original) (raw)
Actions against the empire of AI.
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.
These 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.
We 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.
It 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.
Now 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.
We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision… We can change the world because we have many times before.
— Rebecca Solnit, writer and activist, Hope in the Dark
What can I do to resist AI?
Nothing 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.
Inspired 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.
Our 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.
Possible Futures
“Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within” — Ruha Benjamin, scholar, writer, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, and founding director of the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab.
We have the power to collectively imagine better tech futures, rooted in justice and regeneration for people and the planet. We’ve collected a few projects that show the many possibilities.
Hire a COOP
Hire 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.
LATAMReimaginingReclaimingCurrent Projects
Huniki Federation
Huniki 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.
AfricaReclaimingCurrent Projects
Sovereign AI and Sustainable Computation for Indigenous Communities
The 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.
Indigenous PepopleReclaimingPossible Future
Te Hiku Media's Te Reo Māori speech-recognition tool
Te 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."
Asia/OceanaIndigenous PepopleReclaimingCurrent Projects
Lesan AI
Lesan 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.
AfricaReclaimingCurrent Projects
Slow AI
Nonprofit 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.
GlobalReimaginingPossible Future
Africa Technology Assesment Platform (AfriTAP)
The 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.
AfricaReclaimingCurrent Projects
Permacomputing
Permacomputing 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.
GlobalReimaginingResistingReclaimingCurrent ProjectsPossible Future
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