AI Resistance: Who Says No to AI and Why?
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AI resistance: Who says no to AI and why? - Digital Society Blog:
A poisoned dataset. A writers' strike that froze Hollywood for 148 days. Street protests against data centres. Behind each of these acts lies a growing global pushback against artificial intelligence. Drawing on the recent report, "From Rejection to Regulation: Mapping the Landscape of AI Resistance," by Can Simsek and Ayse Gizem Yasar, this article examines how artists, workers, activists, and scholars challenge the design, deployment, and governance of AI systems. It explores the drivers behind AI resistance and outlines a research agenda that treats these acts not as obstacles, but as vital contributions to democratic AI governance.
Artificial intelligence is catalysing a radical sociotechnical transformation, reshaping not only our technological infrastructures but also the institutions that organise society. In the midst of this shift, crucial questions arise: Who determines the direction of this change and the future we want to build? Who remains unheard in the conversation? Are we passive observers of increasingly deployed powerful algorithms, or do we have the agency and responsibility to challenge and reshape them?
Acts of pushback are already unfolding across diverse domains and geographies. While heterogeneous in form and motivation, these interventions share a critical orientation towards the pace, purpose, and underlying power structures of contemporary AI development. Rather than isolated incidents, they constitute elements of a broader landscape of AI resistance that demands closer attention.
To see today's pushback against AI in context, it helps to remember that resistance to new technology is nothing new. Technological paradigm shifts have consistently triggered societal concern and resistance, from the 19th century Luddites who opposed textile machinery due to labor displacement, to current debates on digital surveillance and algorithmic bias. As artificial intelligence emerges as a major transformative force, public reactions continue to alternate between optimism and concern. On the one hand, governments and private firms are committing unprecedented levels of investment in AI development; on the other, a growing amount of "AI resistance" raises fundamental objections to how these technologies are being designed, produced, deployed, and governed. But what exactly is AI resistance?
The concept of "resistance" in the context of AI encompasses a wide spectrum of actions and discourses that may be overt or subtle, organised or diffuse, individual or collective, oppositional or reformist. Drawing on insights from critical theory and science and technology studies, resistance to artificial intelligence can be understood as a form of agency exercised within existing systems of power. In this framing, the object of resistance is not technology per se, but the sociotechnical arrangements and asymmetries that both shape and are shaped by the development and application of AI.
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