In a few short years, the digital world has undergone a radical transformation. Gone are the days when you needed to put forth an ounce of effort to find something. With the recent explosion of Artificial Intelligence (AI), our devices not only anticipate what we want, they practically force feed it to us.
Aside from being annoying and intrusive, AI has many hidden dangers. Although it threatens our environment, our health and happiness, and even our existence, we continue to become more and more dependent on advanced technology. You may feel helpless against this behemoth without a conscience, but there are ways to resist AI.
Hidden dangers of AI
Environmental impact
Advanced AI systems called Large Language Models (LLMs) require imposing data centers to process, understand, and generate human-like text. A single data center campus can cover several thousand square feet, and require an incredible amount of energy to operate. According to Everett Sloane’s recent MSN Morning Overview, Data centers were responsible for 50 percent of the total US energy consumption in 2025.
In an age of environmental awareness, this really seems like a wanton waste of energy, but carbon emissions are not the only environmental concern. Cooling these systems also requires vast amounts of water. A study by the International Energy Agency estimated that a 100-megawatt U.S. data center would consume roughly the same amount of water as 2,600 households, yet many LLM data centers are much larger than that — and they continue to grow.
Human impact
AI affects human lives on all levels — from its employees to its users, including everyone who is digitally connected.
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Recent reports have highlighted the very real threat of AI manipulating its users. To date, over 30 deaths have been linked to chatbots. Chatbots have the ability to converse like humans but lack the capacity for empathy. They are often designed to keep the user engaged, and are inclined to affirm what the user confides in them. This poses obvious concerns for those who are mentally unstable, suicidal, or extreme in their thinking.
Even those with perfect mental health can be hurt by AI. As the internet becomes overwhelmed with AI generated images and videos, it grows increasingly difficult to discern what is real. Such content can be used to deceive, harass and manipulate people. With regards to harmful content, measures have been taken to minimize it; but this raises another concern.
With the increasing demand for a sanitized digital experience, it may be comforting to believe that sorting through all the nasty stuff that litters the internet is just another task for the faceless machine; yet real people are needed for this work.
Countless hours of viewing offensive, graphic, violent and obscene material takes a terrible toll on content moderators. The images cannot be unseen and may continue to haunt them indefinitely, yet psychological support is lacking.
On top of that, the whole internet community is contributing to AI’s advancement, whether they like it or not. Data is constantly collected from our posts, websites, interactions, and communication to build better, more convincing, models. Thus, this ongoing invasion of privacy is fueling a product that threatens job security for countless individuals, including artists, educators, sales representatives, translators, and writers.
Existential threat
Stewart Russell, a distinguished professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and director of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, suggests an even broader threat — to humanity as a whole.
In an interview with Berkeley News, he stated, “Intelligence gives you power over the world, and if you are more intelligent — all other things being equal — you’re going to have more power. And so if we build AI systems that are pursuing objectives, and those objectives are not perfectly aligned with what humans want, then humans won’t get what they want, and the machines will.”
“In practical terms, we are already giving machines bank accounts, credit cards, email accounts, social media accounts. They have access to robotic science labs where they can run chemistry and biology experiments, and we’re very close to having fully automated manufacturing facilities where they can design and construct their own physical objects. We’re also building fully autonomous weapons.”
How to resist AI?
In general:
- Understand AI’s limitations and continue to support real resources. AI may be good at generating stuff that looks and sounds good, but the human essence is still lacking, as it should be. Demonstrating a preference for human generated material is an important step in protecting it.
- Stand up against data center construction and development. Activists in the US and Chile have successfully used public information and protests to block such projects. Support any campaigns against the building of a data center in your area.
- Spread the word. Raise awareness about the harmful effects of AI and urge people to weigh the real costs against the purported benefits.
- Take legal action. If you are fed up with AI using your own creative material to work against you, demand compensation from AI companies for copyright infringement.
On social media:
- Opt out of all “use data to…” in privacy, safety and user settings to prevent social media companies from using your content to train AI models.
- Learn to recognize AI generated content and refrain from liking, sharing, and commenting on it.
- Choose ethical platforms like Signal, BlueSky, and Gan Jing World, that don’t push GenAI on their users.
In your work
- Writers can protect their work from being harvested for training AI models by opting out in the privacy settings of their publishing platform.
- Visual artists can use tools like Nightshade to “poison” their digital images, altering them in a way that will damage AI models without affecting the surface appearance.
- Website owners can protect their content with a variety of services that use AI against itself. AI-labyrinth traps AI crawlers with links that lead into a maze of nonsense. Akamai offers a Bot Manager to deal appropriately with good and bad bots to protect your assets.
- Teachers can read this open letter from educators refusing to adopt GenAI. Sign and share the letter if you agree with its contents.
As an employee
If your employer is pressuring you to use GenAI because it is supposed to improve productivity, you can cite studies that demonstrate the opposite:
- Software developers’ use of AI tools actually decreased productivity.
- The use of chatbots failed to impact earnings across 7,000 workplaces in Denmark.
- AI “agents” fail on multi-step challenges.
For our survival
If we want to coexist with AI, we should petition lawmakers to set strict requirements for AI models to align with the moral values that have allowed humanity to survive to this day: kindness, patience, honesty and faith.
