The AI Resist List

Actions against the empire of AI.

See the ListExplore possible futures

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

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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.

Our nine pillars

NarrativeFundingDataData Centers

Resource ExtractionLabor

AdoptionSurveillancePolicy

The Resist List

"Microslop"

Throughout 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.

GlobalOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions

DI.DAY - Digital Independence Day

DI.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.

EuropeSupport, build, and use alternatives to Big Tech tools

Memetivism

“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.

EuropeOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions

Better Images of AI

Better 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.

GlobalSupport, build, and use alternatives to Big Tech tools

Report algorithmically facilitated injustice

AlgorithmWatch 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.

EuropeTrack industry abuse

Media Capture Watch

Media 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.

GlobalTrack industry abuse

Surveillance Watch

Surveillance 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.

GlobalTrack industry abuse

Public backlash against Bytedance’s video-generation model

ByteDance, 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.

ASIA/OCEANIATrack industry abuse

Nightshade

Nightshade 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.

US/CanadaWeaken corrosive technological systems

A Chinese voice artist sued companies that cloned her voice with AI softwares

In 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.

ASIA/OCEANIAUndertake legal action

Digital Citizen Campaign against Google Data Center

Movimiento 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.

LATAMOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions

Border Community challenges Open-AI Data Center

Through 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.

US/CanadaUndertake legal action

Friends of the Congo

Friends 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.

AfricaOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions

The Coalition of Digital Employees – Artificial Intelligence (CODE AI)

In 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.

ASIA/OCEANIAOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions

Tech Workers Coalition

Tech 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.

US/CanadaEuropeOrganize and participate in protests, campaigns, and interventions

Japan Metal, Manufacturing, Information and Telecommunication Workers’ Union (JMITU)

A 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.

ASIA/OCEANIAUndertake legal action

Worker-led mental health resource for data

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