{"id":2089,"date":"2026-03-02T13:28:49","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T13:28:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?p=2089"},"modified":"2026-03-02T13:28:49","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T13:28:49","slug":"i-checked-out-one-of-the-biggest-anti-ai-protests-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?p=2089","title":{"rendered":"I checked out one of the biggest anti-AI protests ever"},"content":{"rendered":"
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And yet despite that urgency, the atmosphere at the march was pleasant, even fun. There was no sense of anger and little sense that lives\u2014let alone the survival of our species\u2014was at stake. That could be down to the broad coalition of interests and demands that protestors brought with them.<\/p>\n
A chemistry researcher I spoke to ticked off a litany of complaints, which ranged from the\u00a0conspiracy-adjacent (that data centers emitted infrasound below the threshold of human hearing that induced paranoia in people who lived near them) to the reasonable (that the spread of AI slop online was making it hard to find reliable academic sources). The researcher\u2019s solution was to make it illegal for companies to profit from the technology: \u201cIf you couldn’t make money from AI, it wouldn’t be such a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most people I spoke to agreed that technology companies probably wouldn\u2019t take any notice of this kind of protest. \u201cI don’t think that the pressure on companies will ever work,\u201d Maxime Fournes, the global head of Pause AI, told me when I bumped into him at the march: \u201cThey are optimized to just not care about this problem.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Fournes, who worked in the AI industry for 12 years before joining Pause AI, thinks he can make it harder for those companies. \u201cWe can slow down the race by creating protection for whistleblowers or showing the public that working in AI is not a sexy job, that actually it\u2019s a terrible job\u2014you can dry up the talent pipeline.\u201d<\/p>\n
In general, most protestors hoped to make as many people as possible aware of the issues and to use that groundswell to push for government regulation. The organizers had pitched the march as a social event, encouraging anyone curious about the cause to come along.<\/p>\n
It seemed to have worked. I met a man who worked in finance who had tagged along with his roommate. I asked why he was there. \u201cSometimes you don’t have that much to do on a Saturday anyway,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you can see the logic of the argument, it sort of makes sense to you, then it’s like \u2018Yeah, sure, I\u2019ll come along and see what it’s like.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
He thought the concerns around AI were hard for anyone to fully oppose. It\u2019s not like a pro-Palestine protest, he said, where you\u2019d have people who might disagree with the cause. \u201cWith this, I feel like it’s very hard for someone to totally oppose what you’re marching for.\u201d<\/p>\n
After winding its way through King\u2019s Cross, the march ended in a church hall in Bloomsbury, where tables and chairs had been set up in rows. The protestors wrote their names on stickers, stuck them to their chests and made awkward introductions to their neighbors. They were here to figure out how to save the world. But I had a train to catch and I left them to it.\u00a0