AI Protest at Three Corporate Locations

Photos: Leon Kunstenaar

(San Franicsco, July 11) – Organized by “Stop AI” hundreds of people, many from the tech industry, marched and rallied at the locations of OpenAI, Anthropic and Deep Mind. Large banners demanded “STOP THE AI RACE”, “QUIT GPT”, “AI IS NOT INEVITABLE. A sign proclaimed “if no one builds it, it does not get built.” With youthful honesty, a sign proclaimed the general view regarding AI with “Fuck This Shit.”

The action was highly organized. A van was there with refreshments. Music was provided by the Saint Gabriel Celestial Brass Band. Events concluded with pizza at the Embarcadero. The thousands just leaving the Giants baseball game enjoyed passing by some protesters dancing to the Saint Gabriel Band.

Previous iterations of the computer revolution, “mini”computers, microcomputers, the “dot com” and internet explosion, have come and gone without much social and political pushback. Computers “taking over” was chiefly the province of science fiction writers and humorists.

AI is different. Until AI, everything that was thought, said, written and communicated was the end product of a human stringing words together. This was and is the work or civilization. But now, computers, scanning massive datasets, are now coming up, with their own sequences of words, or “thoughts.” These are now supposedly other than gibberish. Who decides?

Many have reservations about AI. The displacement of millions that do mental work such as programming, help desk functions and customer “service”. AI is now generating spoken narratives and creating images from verbal prompts putting “creative” people out of work. As our government has so ably shown, AI is also lying and fooling.

Additional reservations are the issues of corporate control and who controls what AI does. There is also the massive environmental and economic impact of the huge data centers gobbling up everyone’s electrical power,

Many of us are inclined to mistrust AI yet ignoring a potentially calamitous AI consequence. This is nothing less that the destruction of humanity and its civilizations. Who or what are we if thinking itself is now entrusted to machines.

As StopAI sees it:

We believe in the sanctity of human life. We hold that all humans are deserving of respect and basic rights, and that we are all connected to each other. The liberation of any one group is intimately tied to the liberation of all. We hold the humanitarian values of beloved community care, radical inclusion, and compassionate mutual aid.  

We reject the heist and corruption of human knowledge and creativity by AI. We reject the manipulation of emotion and attention by Big Tech. We call for regulations on social media, generative AI, and predatory algorithms. We especially call for emergency regulations on the technological exploitation of children. Dehumanizing technologies that are inimical to critical thinking and human well-being should be regulated by democratic means for the common good.

We reject the story of humanity as the master race of the earth, with a mandate to exploit and destroy the biosphere in pursuit of planetary or galactic conquest. We reject "transhumanist" or "singularity" projects that aim to merge humans with machines, build a successor "species" of digital "beings" or achieve “immortality.” We stand for humble stewardship of nature and genuine human freedom and autonomy.

We reject proposals or debates on AI “personhood.” Software and silicon are not living beings. Artificial “entities” have no more rights than a laptop computer, a book, or a piece of paper.

We reject appeals to the purported utopian possibilities of AI. Claims that AI and technology will magically solve our problems are dangerous fantasies and rationalizations unsupported by facts or logic. We have the power to address humanity’s greatest challenges NOW. What is lacking is democratic power and moral will, caused by many of the same elite forces now pushing AI and technocracy. AI will not solve our crisis of morality and it presents a grave threat to the democratic project.

We stand against the Human Replacement Agenda that seeks the unmitigated destruction of human labor, thought, and skills. We stand for a slower, smaller, and sustainable economy; not an explosion of “efficiency” or “productivity” in wasteful consumption and increasing inequality.

We call for an international ban on autonomous and AI-driven weapons.

We call for a permanent enforceable ban on ASI/AGI.

We call for robust regulations on surveillance and intellectual property theft.

See all high resolution photos here.