The people fighting back against an AI future

Laiba Rehman wanted to cure death.

After losing her religious faith, the astrophysics student became consumed by the thought that she and everyone she loved had only one lifetime. She began studying biology alongside her degree, hoping to find a way to extend human life. But as she learned more about AI, she became convinced it could wipe out humanity long before she even had the chance to grow old.

Today, Laiba believes AI could bring about human extinction within just two years. She’s put her studies at the University of Leicester on hold, setting aside her ambiton of becoming an astrophysics professor to try to prevent it.

“I do cry about it a few times a week,” she says. ​“Because obviously I love everyone and I don’t want the world to end.”

Now an AI safety writer, she volunteers with Pause AI, a campaign group calling for a halt to the development of artificial general intelligence until effective regulation is in place. 

She’s leafleted, organised media campaigns and delivered public presentations. When Jacob Coxon, a researcher at leading AI company Anthropic, quit his job and warned that AI was advancing so fast it could wipe out humanity in the near future, Laiba helped organise an emergency protest calling for the government to take action.

Yet Laiba is no technophobe. She sees AI’s potential. What frightens her is the possibility that humanity will fail to put in safeguards. Laiba believes there’s still time to change course, despite a prevailing narrative that suggests otherwise. 

You’ve heard it by now: AI is coming, whether you like it or not. Adapt or be left behind. Resistance is futile! Except a growing number of ordinary people are refusing to accept that our technological future has already been written. 

For Laiba, the fear is what AI might do to humanity in the future. But its consequences are already hitting home. One estimate suggests AI could displace one in 11 workers. Microsoft has just offered buyouts to 60,000 employees — more than a quarter of its workforce — and most recently, Barclays announced 5,000 job cuts even as profits soar. It’s no surprise over a third of graduates 35% of graduates believe AI is threatening their career prospects. Forget killer robots. What happens when the machines take the jobs, and the tech billionaires take all the profits?

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And the costs don’t stop there. Behind AI’s apparent magic are artists and writers whose work has been scraped without permission, and poorly paid workers doing the painstaking, often traumatising labour of training the technology. Then there’s the environmental bill: data centres already consume as much electricity as some entire countries, with global demand expected to double by 2030, largely driven by AI. 

But what does it actually mean to fight back against something as vast and intangible as AI? There’s no single movement, and little agreement on what victory would even look like. 

Yet these disparate battles are beginning to add up. Just look at the AI Resist List, a growing collection of grassroots movements around the world determined to have a say in how AI impacts their lives.

From schoolchildren in Hong Kong plotting an escape from Big Tech; to Māori technologists in New Zealand building their own AI tools to protect their language; to Nightshade, a tool that lets artists alter their digital images almost invisibly at pixel-level, to ​“poison” AI training data if their work is scraped without permission – it’s a remarkable snapshot of the ways people are taking matters into their own hands.

“One of the reasons the inevitability narrative has been so powerful is because people don’t have the examples of what they can do,” explains Tania Duarte, founder of UK nonprofit We and AI, one of the organisations behind the AI Resist List. 

Tania used to work in marketing for tech startups, but began to worry she was on the ​“wrong side of history”. She now describes herself as a ​“poacher turned gamekeeper”. By bringing these acts of resistance together and shining a light on ways to fight back, she hopes the AI Resist List can challenge the idea that ordinary people are powerless to influence AI’s future. 

But it’s a message Tania worries is getting lost amid warnings about AI’s potentially catastrophic consequences.

“When it’s framed in such incredibly existential terms, it’s hard to see how you can possibly play a role,” she says. ​“There are things that are happening now, things that we can be regulating now, fights we can be having now.”

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Take Kenya’s Data Labelers Association, one of the groups featured on the List. Its members are among the often invisible workforce responsible for labelling images and categorising data used to train AI.

They’re not fighting to stop the technology, but to secure a fairer deal for their work: a minimum wage of $5 an hour, better conditions and mental health support for those exposed to disturbing content.

The stakes are painfully immediate. Michael Geoffrey Asia, the Association’s Secretary General, says members have asked to borrow as little as a dollar for dinner, with volunteers sometimes dipping into their own pockets to help. 

Even talking about their experiences can be difficult, as many are bound by non-disclosure agreements, which Michael describes as a ​“slave tool”. But the association is beginning to break that silence, helping workers speak out about their conditions and take their demands directly to policymakers. 

“When you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu,” he says. ​“And when you’re on the menu, anyone can eat you up.”

Yet Michael’s own feelings about AI are complicated. He describes himself as a ​“victim of AI”, but there’s pride, too, in knowing that his work has helped build the technology from the ground up. 

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But AI doesn’t just need people to build it. It needs somewhere to live. And those buildings are becoming battlegrounds of their own. 

Outside the Ministry of Housing in Westminster, protesters have gathered to oppose plans for a new data centre on Brick Lane, the historic heart of London’s Bangladeshi community. The demonstration, organised by Nijjor Manush, a British Bangladeshi grassroots group fighting gentrification in the area, has brought together an unlikely crowd, from civil servant trade unions to anarchist communists. 

“SHUT DOWN AI DATA CENTRES”, declare a set of placards. ​“Water for humans not AI” demands another. A third asks: ​“Hey ChatGPT – how can I fit over 30,000 people into 6 social houses?”

Curiously, the Brick Lane data centre isn’t even intended for AI – it’s being developed for financial trading businesses in the City of London. But data centres have become a lightning rod for wider anxieties about Big Tech. Even when they have nothing to do with AI, the sheer number springing up is enough to make people uneasy. The town of Slough, better known for The Office than for being a tech HQ, is now home to around 40 of them.

Back at Westminster, Hajera Begum, co-founder of Nijjor Manush, welcomes the attention and new allies that the data centre backlash has brought to their years-long battle. Growing up in a council house near Brick Lane, she’s watched the housing struggles faced by her parents and grandparents continue into her own generation. 

“It’s so simple,” says Hajera. ​“Build houses…don’t build data centres.”

She adds, ​“People will survive with less storage space. We’ll be fine. What we need is housing security, affordable food, jobs.” 

Land isn’t the only resource at stake. Data centres need huge amounts of electricity, and water to stop their servers overheating. Some can guzzle up to five million gallons a day, enough to supply 50,000 people. Yet nearly two-thirds of planned US data centres are set to be built in areas already suffering from drought.

But backlash is already proving hard to ignore. In the US alone, local opposition helped block or delay 75 data centre projects worth an eye-watering $130 billion in the first three months of 2026, according to Data Center Watch. 

Of all the concerns surrounding AI, data centres have become a focus for protesters because they offer something tangible to fight against, explains Maxime Fournes, who leads Pause AI globally. AI can feel like an ​“abstract monster”, he says, while protesting data centres is a way of ​“preventing humans from building its body”.

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But Maxime believes the concerns driving these protests are only the ​“tip of the iceberg”. His greatest fear is human extinction, the same fear that drove Laiba to put her studies on hold. 

He spent a decade working as an AI engineer before he began to worry that scientists wouldn’t figure out how to control the technology in time. He looked for a technical solution, but eventually concluded that the problem could not be solved by tech alone. 

“I realised this is actually a human coordination problem,” he says. ​“The way we achieve great things is by coordinating with each other and organising.” 

So he joined Pause AI, working two years full-time without pay. 

Today, the organisation is calling for an international agreement to halt the development of artificial general intelligence until it can be made safe. Maxime thinks such a pause would help tackle the problems other movements are fighting, too. 

“Stopping the development of this technology will actually make all the other problems better,” he argues.

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Taking on an industry set to attract trillions of dollars is no small task. But Pause AI isn’t sitting around waiting for politicians to act. It’s teaching supporters around the world how to lobby their governments and organise protests. The group staged an emergency demonstration after an Anthropic researcher quit over fears about AI’s existential risks, and convened politicians and experts in Parliament to push for UK legislation curbing the development of advanced AI.

“We’re basically using all the democratic levers that we have at our disposal,” Maxime says.

Yet protesting AI doesn’t necessarily mean taking to the streets or challenging politicians.

Dylan Orchard, a researcher at King’s College London and the man behind Say Yes, Do No, a DIY guide to reclaiming agency over AI, studies what he calls ​“everyday resistance”: the mundane, often invisible ways people push back against technologies they feel are being imposed on them.

His research originally focused on gentrification and underground art, until he noticed artists fighting back against AI companies using their work without permission. ​“I got sucked into it completely,” he says.

“I would say resistance starts where you start recognising a power dynamic,” he explains. Not using ChatGPT because you dislike its answers is one thing. Refusing because you object to the company behind it, or the pressure to use it, is an act of defiance.

Sometimes it’s as simple as ridiculing AI slop, or saying yes to your boss’s latest tech rollout, then quietly carrying on as before. 

“We should all be a bit more objectionable,” he says. Even moaning to your friends counts. ​“People say, ​‘I just complained to my friends.’ I’m like, ​‘That’s fucking good’! You’re trying to change your entire social circle by raising the issues.” 

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There are signs it’s working. Dylan points to the growing number of artists proudly declaring their work AI-free, with even big companies now keen to emphasise their use of human designers. ​“The whole narrative had to shift slightly to account for their resistance,” he says.

While artists are among the loudest voices in the AI debate, Dylan reckons almost everyone has a breaking point. Even its most enthusiastic users have their red lines, whether that’s facial recognition, deepfakes or something else.

A student worried about human extinction, a Kenyan data labeller fighting for better pay, and Londoners campaigning for homes instead of data centres may have very different ideas about which risks matter most, and what should be done about them. But they all agree the future of AI shouldn’t be decided without them.

For Laiba, taking action has helped her manage her fears, even if the future remains uncertain. ​“Don’t let your worry just be worries,” she says. ​“Take some action.

“It’s a new field that’s building the plane as it flies,” she points out. ​“You may have a chance to do something about it.”

Ginnia Cheng is a freelance journalist and comedienne, and the host of Huck’s series The Obsessives. Follow her on Instagram.

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