By Aphie Gover, Bruna Martins, Laura Hernández and Sarah Ruth
In October 2025, we published the Resisting, Refusing, Reclaiming, Reimagining: Charting Challenges to Narratives of AI Inevitability paper, and the response was immediate and overwhelming. The positive reaction from many groups, including corporate channels we would never expect to be mentioned in, showed that there was a clear appetite for understanding why the hype and narrative around AI is always framed as unstoppable and inevitable.
We started getting contacted by individuals, organisations, and movements who were challenging and reframing AI inevitability. The interest was so great that a new project was born: notinevitable.ai, a repository for case studies of showing the many ways that extractive AI can be challenged.
Along the way, we discovered that a very similar project was being developed by the Distributed AI Research Institute, The Refugee Law Lab at York University, and led by author and journalist Karen Hao with contributions from other independent journalists. Whilst we based our work on the 4R framework, their project was based on the pillars of the AI empire, as exposed in Karen’s book. The synergy of ideas and intention was so great that we decided to merge the two projects.
What is the AI Resist List?
The AI Resist List is a project that illuminates the ways that people, communities, and organisations are pushing back against extractive AI development and deployment around the world. We hope it serves as a central point where people can be inspired, find ways to get involved, and connect to build solidarity against exploitative AI development.
The initiatives highlighted in the list are mapped against nine pillars, which are directly connected to actions we can take to get involved:
- Narrative: you can call out the hype, challenge the need for expanding AI capabilities.
- Funding: start to question where all the capital is coming from and the funders’ end-goal.
- Data: establish mechanisms that prevent your data from being scraped, know your data ownership and privacy rights.
- Data Centers: join forces with your community to protest the development of AI’s physical infrastructure, and learn about the local and global implications of their energy consumption and environmental harms.
- Resource Extraction: educate yourself on how this work disproportionately impacts the Global South, and fight against the pace of which the AI industry is extracting and using important planetary materials.
- Labor: use your voice to advocate for the rights of data workers and reject the normalisation of exploiting workers, especially in the Global South.
- Adoption: decentralise Big Tech from your life, turn off AI features, and challenge the necessity of AI adoption in your everyday life and workplace.
- Surveillance: start an organized effort against an increased surveillance state, campaign for better privacy rights.
- Policy & Government: make your feelings heard and demand better policies from your representatives.
As well as organisations challenging these pillars, there is also a really inspiring selection of organisations showing possible futures, ones which create a more just and sustainable future that we actually want to live in.
How does this fit in to our other projects?
Moving our database to the AI Resist List means that our original project notinevitable.ai can now focus on documenting the stories and continuous research enabled by exploring ways people are responding to AI across the world. Building on case studies from the AI Resist List, it will produce research, articles, and act as a community space for future resistance work. We invite collaborators and movements that are promoting a future that is collectively decided, that puts AI’s trajectory into the hands of the people rather than a select few, to contribute to counter the narrative that nothing can be done.
There too you can further explore the 4R framework for countering narratives of inevitability.
We will also be discussing the research we are currently curating on the ethical imperatives and emerging practices of individuals, communities, organisations and collectives actively resisting, refusing, reclaiming, and reimagining “AI”. We have a Call for Papers for a Topical Collection at the AI & Ethics journal open until 31st July. The editorial team consists of thirteen researchers working on different areas of critical AI who are committed to challenging the extractive nature of academia from within.
Holding space for alternative narratives
Our time coordinating the Better Images of AI collaboration has given us an insight into the power of making space for researchers, activists, creatives and people who want to challenge and reinvent narratives to contribute and learn from each other. The start of this new collaboration has been incredibly exciting, working with people who have influenced many of our projects. We have learned a lot contributions of insight of Global majority responses and perspectives, and know the value of incorporating it into our work. This project will grow and continue to build powerful collaborations at a time we need them most.
Our hope is that the AI Resist List serves as a proof and inspiration that anyone can challenge the asymmetrical power dynamics driving the AI industry and the narratives of its inevitability. From organising political action, to decentralising Big Tech from your life, creating immersive art installations, and designing inventive toys, there are so many ways to get involved with this work, to join a movement, to change the trajectory of AI development. The AI Resist List is only one entry point into the possibilities and the incredible efforts happening around the world. It is a journalistic and research attempt to document a representative snapshot of global resistance, and it is just the beginning.