---
title: "Down with AI doom"
date: "2026-10-08T00:01:00+01:00"
modified: "2026-10-01T18:14:36+01:00"
url: "https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/down-with-ai-doom/"
post_id: 10998
---

# Down with AI doom

![](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/10/nils-huenerfuerst-XvVAR3NIKug-unsplash-edited.jpg)Image credit: Nils HuenerfuerstI consider myself a tech optimist up to the point where I have to explain to students or audiences about the dark side of AI. As a professor of artificial intelligence and society, it’s my job to research and teach about the impact that technologies have on people’s lives. That’s not just the lives of the users; it also includes the lives of those who mine the raw materials, who supply the content, who work in or live near the data centres, who moderate the output, or who have the technology used on them – with or without their consent. Things get gloomy very quickly.

Recently, the Digital Futures Institute that I lead at King’s College London released a report on the growing pushback against AI. Our findings confirm that there is resistance among the UK public to the increasingly rapid imposition of large language models, chatbots and other forms of AI technology.

We’re told that we must get on board or be left in the dust. But technological determinism (the idea that technology arrives and then society adapts to it) glosses over the human decisions and power structures involved, making change seem inevitable when it is actually a choice. Technology is used by us, but it’s also used on us, and people are getting increasingly frustrated at having no say in how it is shaped.

We can make personal decisions: avoiding generating pointless AI images is an easy one, as is ignoring patchy AI summaries on browsers in favour of digging deeper ourselves. But that doesn’t mean we have control over our environment, where many of these technologies are already embedded in workplaces or baked into the software of our phones.

“There is a vast difference between stopping using AI and stopping being exposed to AI,” remarked one survey respondent. Seventy per cent of those we asked felt it would be difficult or impossible for them to avoid AI, raising questions about how people can meaningfully consent to its use.

A feeling of powerlessness is feeding growing resentment towards the Big Tech companies, with their huge empires and vast global reach. A battle with the tech bros seems doomed to failure: they have all the money and all the unchecked influence, a chokehold on the market, and there’s no regulation to stop them.

But we have the numbers. We have consumer power. And slowly but surely, people are exercising their democratic right to have their say and take a stand.

It’s there in the class action lawsuits demanding recompense for copyright breaches. It’s the protesters marching against data centres that would drain water from public drinking supplies. It’s tens of thousands of people writing to their MPs to tell them to be mindful of who gets access to our private data.

We have a collective voice, and we hold the purse strings. We can hit brands where it hurts. We can call for a better way. We can adopt an informed scepticism, make decisions about what we use and why. We are not just subject to the systems we use. We hold within us the capacity, both individually and collectively, to question and shape them.