In a few short years, the digital world has undergone a radical transformation. Gone are the days when you needed to put forth an ounce of effort to find something. With the recent explosion of Artificial Intelligence (AI), our devices not only anticipate what we want, they practically force feed it to us.
Aside from being annoying and intrusive, AI has many hidden dangers. Although it threatens our environment, our health and happiness, and even our existence, we continue to become more and more dependent on advanced technology. You may feel helpless against this behemoth without a conscience, but there are ways to resist AI.
Hidden dangers of AI
Advanced AI systems called Large Language Models (LLMs) require imposing data centers to process, understand, and generate human-like text. A single data center campus can cover several thousand square feet, and require an incredible amount of energy to operate. According to Everett Sloane’s recent MSN Morning Overview, Data centers were responsible for 50 percent of the total US energy consumption in 2025.
In an age of environmental awareness, this really seems like a wanton waste of energy, but carbon emissions are not the only environmental concern. Cooling these systems also requires vast amounts of water. A study by the International Energy Agency estimated that a 100-megawatt U.S. data center would consume roughly the same amount of water as 2,600 households, yet many LLM data centers are much larger than that — and they continue to grow.
AI affects human lives on all levels — from its employees to its users, including everyone who is digitally connected.
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Recent reports have highlighted the very real threat of AI manipulating its users. To date, over 30 deaths have been linked to chatbots. Chatbots have the ability to converse like humans but lack the capacity for empathy. They are often designed to keep the user engaged, and are inclined to affirm what the user confides in them. This poses obvious concerns for those who are mentally unstable, suicidal, or extreme in their thinking.
Even those with perfect mental health can be hurt by AI. As the internet becomes overwhelmed with AI generated images and videos, it grows increasingly difficult to discern what is real. Such content can be used to deceive, harass and manipulate people. With regards to harmful content, measures have been taken to minimize it; but this raises another concern.
With the increasing demand for a sanitized digital experience, it may be comforting to believe that sorting through all the nasty stuff that litters the internet is just another task for the faceless machine; yet real people are needed for this work.
Countless hours of viewing offensive, graphic, violent and obscene material takes a terrible toll on content moderators. The images cannot be unseen and may continue to haunt them indefinitely, yet psychological support is lacking.
On top of that, the whole internet community is contributing to AI’s advancement, whether they like it or not. Data is constantly collected from our posts, websites, interactions, and communication to build better, more convincing, models. Thus, this ongoing invasion of privacy is fueling a product that threatens job security for countless individuals, including artists, educators, sales representatives, translators, and writers.
Stewart Russell, a distinguished professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and director of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, suggests an even broader threat — to humanity as a whole.
In an interview with Berkeley News, he stated, “Intelligence gives you power over the world, and if you are more intelligent — all other things being equal — you’re going to have more power. And so if we build AI systems that are pursuing objectives, and those objectives are not perfectly aligned with what humans want, then humans won’t get what they want, and the machines will.”
“In practical terms, we are already giving machines bank accounts, credit cards, email accounts, social media accounts. They have access to robotic science labs where they can run chemistry and biology experiments, and we’re very close to having fully automated manufacturing facilities where they can design and construct their own physical objects. We’re also building fully autonomous weapons.”
How to resist AI?
If your employer is pressuring you to use GenAI because it is supposed to improve productivity, you can cite studies that demonstrate the opposite:
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