For a number of hours this Saturday, February 28, I watched as a pair hundred anti-AI protesters marched through London’s King’s Cross tech hub, home to the UK headquarters of OpenAI, Meta and Google DeepMind, chanting slogans and waving signs. The march was organized by a coalition of two separate activist groups, Pause AI and Pull the Plug, who billed it as the most important protest of its kind yet.
The range of concerns on show covered every part from online slop and abusive images to killer robots and human extinction. One woman wore a big homemade billboard on her head that read “WHO WILL BE WHOSE TOOL?” (with the Os in “TOOL” cut out as eye holes). There have been signs that said “Pause before there’s cause” and “EXTINCTION=BAD” and “Demis the Menace” (referring to Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind). One other simply stated: “Stop using AI.”
An older man wearing a sandwich board that read “AI? Over my dead body” told me he was concerned in regards to the negative impact of AI on society: “It’s in regards to the dangers of unemployment,” he said. “The devil finds work for idle hands.”
That is all familiar stuff. Researchers have been calling out the harms, each real and hypothetical, brought on by generative AI— especially models reminiscent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google DeepMind’s Gemini—for years. What’s modified is that those concerns are actually being taken up by protest movements that may rally significant crowds of individuals to take to the streets and shout about it.
The primary time I bumped into anti-AI protestors was in May 2023, outside a London lecture hall where Sam Altman was speaking. Two or three people stood heckling an audience of a whole lot. In June last 12 months Pause AI, a small but international organization arrange in 2023 and funded by private donors, drew a crowd of a number of dozen people for a protest outside Google DeepMind’s London office. This felt like a big escalation.
“We wish people to know Pause AI exists,” Joseph Miller, who heads up Pause AI’s UK branch and co-organized Saturday’s march, told me on a call the day before the protest: “We’ve been growing very rapidly. The truth is, we also seem like on a somewhat exponential path, matching the progress of AI itself.”
Miller is a PhD student at Oxford University, where he works on mechanistic interpretability, a brand new field of research that involves trying to grasp exactly what goes on inside LLMs once they perform a task. His work has led him to imagine that the technology may ceaselessly be beyond our control and that this might have catastrophic consequences.
It doesn’t should be a rogue superintelligence, he said. You only needed someone to place AI answerable for nuclear weapons. “The more silly decisions that humanity makes the less powerful the AI needs to be before things go bad,” he said.
After per week during which the US government tried to force Anthropic to permit it to make use of Anthropic’s LLM Claude for any “legal” military purposes, such fears seem less farfetched. Anthropic stood its ground and OpenAI signed a cope with the DoD as a substitute. (OpenAI declined an invite to comment on Saturday’s protest.)
For Matilda de Rui, one other member of Pause AI and co-organizer of the protest, AI is the last problem that humans will face. She thinks the technology will either allow us to unravel—once and for all—every other problem that we’ve got, or it’ll wipe us out and there won’t be anyone around to have problems any more. “It’s a mystery to me that anyone would really give attention to anything in the event that they actually understood the issue,” she told me.
And yet despite that urgency, the atmosphere on the march was nice, even fun. There was no sense of anger and little sense that lives—let alone the survival of our species—was at stake. That might be all the way down to the broad coalition of interests and demands that protestors brought with them.
A chemistry researcher I spoke to ticked off a litany of complaints, that ranged from the conspiracy-adjacent: data centers emitted infrasound below the brink of human hearing that induced paranoia in individuals who lived near them to the reasonable: that the spread of AI slop online was making it hard to seek out reliable academic sources. The researcher’s solution was to make it illegal for firms to cash in on the technology: “When you couldn’t earn a living from AI, it wouldn’t be such an issue.”
Most individuals I spoke to agreed that technology firms probably wouldn’t take any notice of this type of protest. “I don’t think that the pressure on firms will ever work,” Maxime Fournes, the worldwide head of Pause AI, told me after I bumped into him on the protest: “They’re optimized to only not care about this problem.”
But Fournes, who worked within the AI industry for 12 years before joining Pause AI, thinks he could make it harder for those firms. “We will decelerate the race by creating protection for whistleblowers or showing the general public that working in AI is just not a horny job, that truly it’s a terrible job—you may dry up the talent pipeline.”
Normally, most protestors hoped to make as many individuals as possible aware of the problems and to make use of that groundswell to push for presidency regulation. The organizers had pitched the march as a social event, encouraging anyone interested in the cause to come back along.
It looked as if it would have worked. I met a person who worked in finance who had tagged along together with his roommate. I asked why he was there. “Sometimes you don’t have that much to do on a Saturday anyway,” he said. “When you can see the logic of the argument, it type of is smart to you, then it’s like ‘Yeah, sure, I’ll come along and see what it’s like.’”
He thought the concerns around AI were hard for anyone to totally oppose. It’s not like a pro-Palestine protest, he said, where you’d have individuals who might disagree with the cause. “With this, I feel prefer it’s very hard for somebody to totally oppose what you’re marching for and think the precise opposite is true.”
After winding its way through King’s Cross, the march led to a church hall in Bloomsbury, where tables and chairs had been arrange 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 determine the way to save the world. But I had a train to catch and I left them to it. I checked out London’s biggest anti-AI protest march
