I checked out one of the biggest anti-AI protests ever

Pull the plug! Pull the plug! Stop the slop! Stop the slop! For a few hours this Saturday, February 28, I watched as a couple 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 largest protest of its kind yet.

The range of concerns on show covered everything from online slop and abusive images to killer robots and human extinction. One woman wore a large homemade billboard on her head that read “WHO WILL BE WHOSE TOOL?” (with the Os in “TOOL” cut out as eye holes). There were signs that said “Pause before there’s cause” and “EXTINCTION=BAD” and “Demis the Menace” (referring to Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind). Another simply stated: “Stop using AI.”

An older man wearing a sandwich board that read “AI? Over my dead body” told me he was concerned about the negative impact of AI on society: “It’s about the dangers of unemployment,” he said. “The devil finds work for idle hands.”

This is all familiar stuff. Researchers have been calling out the harms, both real and hypothetical, caused by generative AI— especially models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google DeepMind’s Gemini—for years. What’s changed is that those concerns are now being taken up by protest movements that can rally significant crowds of people to take to the streets and shout about it.  

The first time I ran 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 hundreds. In June last year Pause AI, a small but international organization set up in 2023 and funded by private donors, drew a crowd of a few dozen people for a protest outside Google DeepMind’s London office. This felt like a significant escalation.

“We want 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. In fact, we also appear to be 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 new field of research that involves trying to understand exactly what goes on inside LLMs when they carry out a task. His work has led him to believe that the technology may forever be beyond our control and that this could have catastrophic consequences.

It doesn’t have to be a rogue superintelligence, he said. You just needed someone to put AI in charge of nuclear weapons. “The more silly decisions that humanity makes the less powerful the AI has to be before things go bad,” he said.

After a week in which the US government tried to force Anthropic to allow it to use Anthropic’s LLM Claude for any “legal” military purposes, such fears seem less farfetched. Anthropic stood its ground and OpenAI signed a deal with the DoD instead. (OpenAI declined an invitation to comment on Saturday’s protest.)

For Matilda de Rui, another 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 solve—once and for all—every other problem that we have, or it will 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 focus on anything else if they actually understood the problem,” she told me.

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—let alone the survival of our species—was at stake. That could be 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 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’s solution was to make it illegal for companies to profit from the technology: “If you couldn’t make money from AI, it wouldn’t be such a problem.”

Most people I spoke to agreed that technology companies probably wouldn’t take any notice of this kind of protest. “I don’t think that the pressure on companies will ever work,” Maxime Fournes, the global head of Pause AI, told me when I bumped into him at the protest: “They are optimized to just not care about this problem.”

But Fournes, who worked in the AI industry for 12 years before joining Pause AI, thinks he can make it harder for those companies. “We 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’s a terrible job—you can dry up the talent pipeline.”

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.

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. “Sometimes you don’t have that much to do on a Saturday anyway,” he said. “If you can see the logic of the argument, it sort of makes sense 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 fully oppose. It’s not like a pro-Palestine protest, he said, where you’d have people who might disagree with the cause. “With this, I feel like it’s very hard for someone to totally oppose what you’re marching for and think the exact opposite is right.”

After winding its way through King’s 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. I checked out London’s biggest anti-AI protest march