I’ve been saving links about the problems with, and flaws within, generative AI for some time. Here’s a selection of links (necessarily incomplete!) to which I’ll keep adding as new work appears.  (You may find an item linked in more than one category; this means it applies to more than one of the themes I’ve outlined below.) To lead off, a thought-provoking quote from Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic:

“What if the real doomer scenario is that we pollute the internet and the planet, reorient our economy and leverage ourselves, outsource big chunks of our minds, realign our geopolitics and culture, and fight endlessly over a technology that never comes close to delivering on its grandest promises?”

The Heart of the Thing

The AI Resist List (launched May 2026)

Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. May 25, 2026.

Eyes on AI: a game that helps individuals understand how AI-powered surveillance impacts them (and their communities)

Emily M. Bender, “Resisting Dehumanization in the Age of ‘AI’: The View from the Humanities.” Katz Distinguished Lecture, University of Washinton (YouTube), Winter 2026.

Colin Cornaby, “In the Future All Food Will be Cooked in a Microwave, and if you Can’t Deal With That, You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen.” Random Thoughts (blog), August 2025.

Ricky D’Andrea Crano, “A Pedagogy of the Inevitable.” Critical AI, 3:2 (2025).

Hannah Docter-Leob, “Meet the Academics Refusing to Use Generative AI.” Nature, May 5, 2026.

Carla Fehr and Jennifer Saul, “Students as Conscientious Objectors to Generative AI.” Inside Higher Ed, July 30, 2026.

Kevin Gannon, “Sometimes We Resist AI for Good Reasons.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 24, 2025.

Timnet Gebru and Émile P. Torres, “The TESCREAL Bundle: Eugencis and the Promise of Utopia Through Artifical Intelligence.” Firstmind, March 10, 2024.

Olivia Guest and Iris Van Rooij, “AI Is Hollowing Out Higher Education.” Project Syndicate, October 17, 2025.

Mél Hogan, “The Ends of AI: Sycophancy and Psychosis.” Disjunctions, March 2026.

Hannah Docter-Loeb, “Meet the Academics Refusing to Use Generative AI,” Nature, May 5, 2026.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Want to Fight Back Against Big Tech? Start Here.” New York Times, August 3. 2026.

Dan McQuillan, “Resisting AI.” Critical AI Talks [YouTube], December 12, 2025.

Alondra Nelson, “A Civic Grammar for AI Rights,” Science, May 14, 2026.

Nana Nwachukwu, Media Capture Watch. [A website that shows the partnerships between Big Tech and the Media], March 2026.

Marcus Olang’, “I’m Kenyan. I Don’t Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.” Blog post. July 8, 2025.

Anne Helen Petersen, “Don’t Let The Machines Do the Living.” Culture Study, February 8. 2026.

Eryk Salvaggio, “Human Literacy.” Blog post, August 24, 2025.

Marcela Suarez, et al, “Critical AI Literacy: Beyond Hegemonic Perspectives on Sustainability.” Sustainability Dispatch, June 12, 2025.

Tara Tarakiyee, “On the Enshittification of Audre Lorde: ‘The Masters’ Tools’ in Tech Discourse.” Blog post, March 28, 2026.

Janet Vertezi, et al, “Reckoning with the Political Economy of A.I.: Avoiding Decoys in Pursuit of Accountability.” arXiv, April 20, 2026.

SK Winniki, “I Would Be So Ashamed to Use Generative AI, Here’s Why.” Blog Post, February 4, 2026.

Edward Zitron, “The Case Against Generative AI.” Blog post, September 29, 2025 (Long, but worth every word).

The Hype (and why it’s being hyped):

Rachel Auslander, “Historian Mar Hicks on why Nothing about AI is Inevitable.” Fast Company, August 21, 2025.

Emily Bender and Nanna Inie, “We Need To Talk About How We Talk About AI.” Tech Policy Press, January 7 2026.

Benj Edwards, “Is AI Really Trying to Escape Human Control and Blackmail People?” Ars Technica, August 13, 2025.

Robert Evans, “The Cult of AI.” Rolling Stone, January 27, 2024.

Keith Fitzgerald, Bsky post linking to video of Meredith Whitaker (Signal) Explaining The Marketing Myths around Agentic AI. June 26, 2025.

Will Doughlas Heaven, “How AGI Became the most Consequential Conspiracy Theory of our Time.” MIT Technology Review, October 30, 2025 (paywalled).

Nanna Inie, Peter Zukerman, and Emily Bender, “De-Anthropomorphizing “AI”: From Wishful Mnemonics to Accurate Nomaenclature.” First Monday, 31:2 (2026).

Irish Council for Civil Liberties, “Scientists Call on President of the European Commission to Retract AI Hype Statement.” Link to letter, November 10, 2025.

Paris Marx, “Generative AI is a Societal Disaster.” Disconnect, October 24, 2025.

Natasha Mitchell, “The AI Con – Unpacking the Artificial Intelligence Hype Machine.” ABC National Radio, September 2, 2025.

Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, “Sam Altman Says he’s Losing Money on OpenAI’s $200 a Month Subscriptions.” Fortune, January 7, 2025.

Justin Raden, “Higher Ed’s Rush to Adopt AI is About So Much More Than AI.” Defector, October 23, 2025.

Adi Robertson, “Chatbots Aren’t Telling You Their Secrets.” The Verge, August 13, 2025.

Kyle Robison, “OpenAI is Poised to Become The Most Valuable Start-Up Ever. Should It?” Wired, August 19, 2025.

Eryk Salvaggio, “Challenging the Myths of Generative AI.” Tech Policy, August 29, 2024.

Matt Seybold, “‘You Have to Use It; You Have to Trust It’:Forced Adoption of AI is the Subtext of Davos.” The American Vandal, January 23, 2026.

Charlie Warzel, “AI is a Mass-Delusion Event.” The Atlantic, August 18, 2025.

Audrey Watters, “LLM as MLM.” Blog post, August 20, 2025.

Edward Zitron, “OpenAI is a Systemic Risk to the Tech Industry.” Blog post, April 14, 2025.

A Bubble Set to Burst

Laith Al-Khalaf, “‘I’m Nervous’:Klarna Founder Challenges Trillion-Dollar Spending on AI.” Financial Times, November 18, 2025.

Eliot Brown and Robbie Whelan, “Spending on AI is at Epic Levels. Will it Ever Pay Off?” Wall Street Journal, September 25 2025.

Ashley Capoot, “OpenAI Chair Bret Taylor Says AI is ‘Probably’ a Bubble, Expects Correction in Coming Years.” CNBC, January 22, 2026.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, “The Tech Fantasy That Powers AI is Running on Fumes,” New York Times, March 29, 2025.

Cory Doctorow, “AI Companies Will Fail. We Can Salvage Something From the Wreckage.” The Guardian, January 18, 2026.

Cory Doctorow, “Pluralistic: The Real (Economic) AI Apocalypse is Nigh.” Pluralistic, September 25, 2025

Hayden Field, “You’re About to Feel the AI Money Squeeze,” The Verge, April 23, 2026.

Bruce Gil, “AI Added ‘Basically Zero’ to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says.” Gizmodo, February 23, 2026.

Tim Harford, “Are Bubbles Good Actually?” Financial Times, [November?] 2025. (paywalled)

Andy Hirschefdld and Reuters, “Microsoft Stock Plunges as Wall Street Questions AI Investments.” Al Jazeera, January 29, 2026.

Faisal Islam and Rachel Clun, “Google Boss Says Trillion-Dollar AI Investment Boom has ‘Elements of Irrationality.’” BBC, November 18, 2025.

Paul Krugman, “Talking With Paul Kedrosky,” Blog Post, December 6, 2025.

Simon McCarr, “The Gist: AI, The Sound and Fury.” Blog post, November 9, 2025.

Victor Tangermann, “Deutsche Bank Issues Grim Warning for AI Industry.” Futurism, September 24, 2025

Wall Street Journal, “OpenAI Wants Federal Backstop for New Investments.” Video, November 5, 2025.

Matt Wirz and Peter Rudegeair, “Wall Street Blows Past Bubble Worries to Supercharge AI Spending Frenzy,” Wall Street Journal, November 16, 2025.

Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel, “Here’s How the AI Crash Happens.” The Atlantic, October 30, 2025

How LLMs work (and don’t):

Ross Andersen, “Science is Drowning in AI Slop: Peer Review Has Met Its Match.” The Atlantic, January 22, 2026.

Catherine Anderson et al, “Do ChatBots have Language?” Open Library, 2025 (video and text)

Kieran Barker, “Gramarly Revisited.” AI at Carleton College, updated February 17. 2026.

Damien Charlotin, “AI Hallucination Cases Database.” (“This database tracks legal decisions¹ in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of AI-generated arguments.”)

Rosemary Collins, “‘My ‘Methodology’ Was a Series of Errors’: Gemini Generates False Records and Fake Screenshots of TNA [UK National Archives] Website.” Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine, February 25, 2026.

Jim Dickinson, “Some Reasonable Adjustments May Have Just Become Academic Misconduct.” [the problems with Grammarly], WonkHE, October 17, 2025

Dan L. Dinsmore and Luke K. Fryer, “What Does Current AI Actually Mean for Student Learning?” Learning and Individual Difference, 125 (Jan 2026): 102834, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2025.102834.

Jaimi Dowdell, Steve Stecklow, Chad Terhune and Rachael Levy, “As AI Enters the Operating Room, Reports Arise of Botched Surgeries and Misidentified Body Parts.” Reuters, February 10, 2026.

Moshe Glickman and Tali Sharot, “How Human-AI Feedback Loops Alter Human Perceptual, Emotional and Social Judgements.” Nature Human Behavior, December 18, 2024.

Lauren M. E. Goodlad, “We Have Always Been Action Theorists: Toward a Critical Theory of Language for the Era of “Large Language Models.”” Representations, August 2026.

Google Threat Intelligence, “GTIG AI Threat Tracker: Advances in Threat Actor Usage of AI Tools.” Google, November 5, 2025.

Nicholas Grossman, “The Third Algorithm.” Arc Digital, August 23, 2025

Melissa Heikkilä, Chris Cook and Clara Murray, “America’s Top Companies Keep Talking About AI – But Can’t Explain the Upsides.” Financial Times, September 22, 2025

Michael Townsen Hicks et al, “ChatGPT is Bullshit.” Ethics and Information Technology, June 8, 2024

Jeff Horwitz, “Meta’s AI Rules Have Let Bots hold ‘Sensual’ Chats With Kids, Offer False Medical Info.” Reuters, August 14, 2025

Jeremy Hsu, “AI Doesn’t Know ‘No’ – and that’s a Huge Problem for Medical Bots.” New Scientist, May 19, 2025

Faisal Islam, Rachel Clun, Liv McMahon, “Don’t Blindly Trust What AI Tells You, Says Google’s Sundar Pichai,” BBC, November 18, 2025.

Tyler Kingkade, “To Avoid Accusations of AI Cheating, College Students are Turning to AI.” NBC News, January 28, 2026.

Raffi Krikorian, “The Validation Machines.” The Atlantic, October 30, 2025.

Mark A. Lemley and Jacob Noti-Victor, “Anticompetitive Acquiescence in AI Content Licensing,” [a view of how AI companies are positioning themselves to shut down competition from people who are proAI], Promarket, November 18, 2025.

Harshvardhan J. Pandit, et al., “Terms of (Ab)Use: An Analysis of GenAI Services.” ArXiv, March 20, 2026.

Celeste Rodriguez Louro, “Generative AI is Not ‘A Calculator for Words’: 5 Reasons This Idea is Misleading.” The Conversation, August 18, 2025

Gary Marcus, “Why DO Large Language Models Hallucinate?” Blog post, May 5, 2025

James M. McGrath, “What is the Truth in The Era of Bots?” Patheos, January 16, 2026.

Kate Niederhoffer, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, Angela Lee, Alex Liebscher, Kristina Rapuano and Jeffrey T. Hancock, “AI-Generated “Workslop” is Destroying Productivity.” Harvard Business Review, September 25, 2025.

Marcus Olang, “I’m Kenyan. I Don’t Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.” This Man’s Mind, July 8, 2025.

Kyle Orland, “LLMs ‘Simulated Reasoning’ Abilities are a ‘Brittle Mirage’ Researchers Find.” Ars Technica, August 11, 2025

Jared Perlo, “AI’s Capabilities May Be Exaggerated By Flawed Tests, According to New Study.” NBC News, November 5, 2025.

Mark Reidl, “A Very Gentle Introduction to Large Language Models Without the Hype.” Blog Post, April 14, 2023

Pavel Samsonov, “The AI Age is the ‘Age of No Consent.” Blog post, August 1, 2025.

Chris Stokel-Walker, “ChatGPT Edu Feature Reveals Researchers’ Project Metadata Across Universities.” Fast Company, March 11, 2026.

Gyana Swain, “OpenAI Admits AI Hallucinations Are Mathematically Inevitable, Not Just Engineering Flaws,” Computer World, September 18, 2025

Aaron Tay, “The AI-Powered Library Search That Refused to Search.” Blog post, July 28, 2025

John Warner, “Can We Please Stop It with the AI Woo-Woo?” Blog post, February 15, 2026.

Justin Weinberg, “Grammarly is a Cheating Machine.” The Daily Nous, February 17, 2026.

Privacy and General Ethics Issues

Noor Al-Sibai, “OpenAI Says It’s Scanning Users’ ChatGPT Conversations and Reporting Content to the Police.” Futurism, August 27, 2025.

Louise Amoore et al, “Politics of the Prompt: Government in the Age of Generative AI.” Economy and Society, October 5, 2025.

Abi Awomosu, “They Built Stepford AI and Called It ‘Agentic’.” How Not To Use AI, February 1, 2026.

Laura Bates, “How Tech Turned Against Women.” Financial Times, February 20, 2026.

Bridget C. E. Dooley, “Ghostwriting the Government,” Ohio Legal Studies Research Paper No. 913, August 6, 2025.

Maggie Harrison Dupré, “AI Delusions are Leading to Domestic Abuse, Harassment, and Stalking.” Futurism, February 17, 2026.

Andrea Reyes Elizondo and Peter Tarras, “Why AI Transparency Is Not Enough.” Leiden Madtrics, October 15, 2025.

Allison Gordon and Ed Lavandera, “‘You’re Not Rushing. You’re Just Ready’: Parents Say ChatGPT Encouraged Son to Kill Himself.” CNN, November 6, 2025.

Andy Greenberg, “An AI Toy Exposed 50,000 Logs of its Chats With Kids to Anyone with a Gmail Account.” Wired, January 29, 2026.

Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica M. Sibley, “How AI Destroys Institutions.” Boston Univ. School of Law Research Paper No. 5870623, last revised, January 21, 2026.

Howard University, “Racism, Surveillance, and AI Panel,” YouTube, October 2, 2025.

Louis Matsakis, “OpenAI Says Hundreds of Thousands of ChatGPT Users May Show Signs of Manic or Psychotic Crisis Every Week.” Wired, October 27, 2025.

Katharine Miller, “Privacy in an AI Era: How Do We Protect our Personal Information?” Stanford HCAI, March 18, 2024.

Elizabeth Palumbo, “A Student’s Right to Refuse Generative AI.” Blog post, 2025.

Fereniki Panagopoulou, “Privacy in the Age of Artifical Intelligence.” Biomedical Journal of Scientific and Technical Research, 2024.

Pavel Samsonov, “The AI age is the ‘age of no consent’.” Blog post, August 29, 2025.

Gai Sher and Ariela Benchlouch, “The Privacy Paradox with AI.” Reuters, October 31, 2023.

The IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. “Ethically Aligned Design:A Vision for Prioritizing Human Well-being with Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, First Edition.” 2019.

Amanda Silberling, “Seven More Families are now Suing OpenAI over ChatGPT’s role in Suicides, Delusions.” TechCrunch, November 7, 2025.

Tante, “Acting Ethically in an Imperfect World.” Smashing Frames, February 20, 2026.

Greg Toppo, “Students Convene To Hammer Out AI Bill of Rights for Schools,” The 74, July 24, 2026.

Shannon Vallor, “Moral Deskilling and Upskilling in a New Machine Age: Reflections on the Ambiguous Future of Character,” Philosophy and Technology, 28:107 (2015): 107-124.

Elissa Welle, “Tech Companies Don’t Care That Their Students Use AI to Cheat.” The Verge, November 4, 2025.

Georgia Wells, “OpenAI Employees Raised Alarms About Canada Shooting Suspect Months Ago.” Wall Street Journal, February 21, 2026.

Ben Williamson, “The Problem with Evidence Production on AI in Education,” [Blog post] Code Acts in Education, Jun 26, 2026.

Meredith Whittaker, “AI Agents Are Coming for your Privacy, Warns Meredith Whittaker.” The Economist, September 9, 2025.

United Nations Advisory Body on Artifical Intelligence, “Final Report: Governing AI for Humanity.” 2024 (available in multiple languages)

UNC Information Technology Services, “AI, Data Privacy, and You.” January 25, 2024.

Losing out on Thinking:

Anastasia Berg, “Why Even Basic AI Use Is So Bad for Students.” New York Times, October 29, 2025.

Anthropic, “How AI Assistance Impacts the Formation of Coding Skills,” Anthropic, January 29, 2026.

André Barcaui, “ChatGPT as a Cognitive Crutch: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial on Knowledge Retention.” Social Sciences and Humanities Open. 12 (2025).

Mary Burns, et al, “A New Direction for Students in an AI World: Prosper, Prepare, Protect.” Brookings Institute, January 14, 2026.

Claire Cameron, “AI Autocomplete Doesn’t Just Change How You Write. It Changes How You Think.” SciAm, March 11, 2026.

Kyle Chayka, “AI is Homogenizing our Thoughts.” The New Yorker, June 25, 2025.

Michael Clune, “Colleges are Preparing to Self-Lobotomize.” The Atlantic, November 29, 2025. (paywalled)

Matthew Connelly, “A.I. Companies are Eating Higher Education.” The New York Times, February 12, 2026.

Jim Dickinson, “The End of Pretend: AI and the Case for Universities of Formation.” WonkHE, January 12, 2025.

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “AI Makes you Stupid. Discuss.” Blog post, August 26, 2025.

Rachelle Dini, “Literature is Not a Vibe: On ChatGPT and the Humanities,” LA Review of Books, October 31, 2025.

Aisha Down, “‘We Could Have Asked ChatGPT’: Students Fight Back Over Course Taught by AI.” The Guardian, November 20, 2025.

Sonja Drimmer, “Generative AI’s Structure of Feeling,” Artforum, 63:8 (April 2025).

Sonja Drimmer and Christopher N. Nygren, “Four Frictions: Or, How to Resist A.I. In Education.” Public Books, December 12, 2025.

Melanie Dusseau, “Burn It Down: A License for A.I. Resistance.” Inside Higher Ed., November 12, 2024.

The Editors, “Resisting the Rise of the Bots.” Rethinking Schools, Winter 2025-26.

Editorial Board, “AI-proof the Core Curriculum.” The Observer (Notre Dame), October 17, 2025.

Zen Faulkes, “Pulled from the Trough: Slop Images in Academic Journals.” v. 2.0,  January 5, 2026.

Josh Freeman, “If Memory is the Residue of Thought, What are we Learning from AI?” Higher Education Policy Institute, 2025.

Elizabeth Gibney, “How AI Slop Is Causing a Crisis in Computer Science.” Nature, February 13, 2026.

Olivia Guest and Iris Van Rooij, “Disrupted Science: Safeguarding Science from AI.” YouTube, September 12, 2025.

Olivia Guest, “Why Does Cheating Matter?” Website post, March 7, 2026.

Seva Gunitsky, “The Age of Academic Slop Is Upon Us.” Hegemon, January 12, 2026.

Tyler Harper, “The Question All Colleges Should Ask Themselves About AI.” The Atlantic, September 11, 2025.

Rogé Karma, “Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be?” The Atlantic, September 7, 2025.

Martha Kenney and Martha Lincoln, “Let Them Eat Large Language Models: Artificial Intelligence and Austerity in the Neoliberal University.” SocArXiv, October 27, 2025.

Jason Koebler, “AI is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge.” 404, November 6, 2025.

Junhyup Kwon, “AI-Powered Textbooks Fail to Make the Grade in South Korea.” Rest of World, October 15, 2025.

Grace Liu, et al, “AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Individual Performance.” Pre-print. ArXiv, August 5, 2026.

Cooper Lund, “The Incuriosity Engine.” Blog post, February 19, 2025.

Cooper Lund, “The Virtues of Thinking for Yourself.” Blog post, August 13, 2025.

Matthew Magnani and Jon Clindaniel, “Artifical Intelligence and the Interpretation of the Past.” Archaeological Practice, December 18, 2025.

Shiri Melumad, “Learning With AI Falls Short Compared to Old-Fashioned Web Search.” Gizmodo, November 19, 2025.

Ethan Mollick, “Choosing to Stay Human.” Substack post, May 26, 2026.

Meghan O’Rourke, “I Teach Creative Writing: This is what AI is Doing to Students.” New York Times, July 18, 2025.

Luci Pangrazio, “The (im)possibility of AI Literacy.” Learning, Media, and Technology, 51:1 (2026), 1-7.

Maarten Paulusse, “Are AI-Generated Summaries Suitable for Studying and Research?” Eindhoven University of Technology, February 24, 2026.

Ronald Purser, “AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself,” Current Affairs, December 1, 2025.

Justin Raden, “Higher Ed’s Rush to Adopt AI is about So Much More than AI.” Defector, October 23, 2025.

Ned Resnikoff, “You’ll Never Think Alone: On Chatbot Tolitarianism.” Public Comment, May 26, 2025.

Alberto Romero, “A New Wharton Study on AI Warns of a Growing Problem: Cognitive Surrender.” The Algorithmic Bridge, February 23, 2026.

Iris Van Rooij, “Against Automated Plagiarism.” Blog post, December 29, 2022.

Katherine Rundell, “I Hate What AI Is Doing to the Minds and the Happiness of the Young.” The Guardian, August 8, 2026.

Jennifer Sano-Franchini et al, “Refusing Generative AI in Writing Studies.” Refusing GenAI, 2024.

Josh Stein, Bsky thread on AFT’s partnership with tech companies. July 8, 2025.

Will Teague, “I Set a Trap to Catch My Students Cheating with AI. The Results Were Shocking.” Huffpost, November 20, 225.

UNESCO, “AI and the Future of Education.” September 2025 (pdf).

John Warner, “The Limits of AI Research for Real Writers.” Blog post, November 2, 2025.

John Warner, “Writing is Thinking.” Blog post, September 24, 2023.

Charlie Warzel, “This is Just the Internet Now: The Slop Is Winning.” The Atlantic, October 20, 2025.

Marc Watkins, “The Dangers of Using AI to Grade.” Rhetorica, October 10,2025.

Rebecca Winthrop, Kara Swisher, and Rida Karim, “Do AI’s Risks Outweigh the Benefits for Students and Schools?” Brookings Institute [podcast], January 20, 2026.

Rebecca Winthrop, “What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effect on Creativity.” New York Times, May 27, 2026.

Jeffrey R. Young, “Is My Professor Using AI?” Learning Curve Podcast, October 15, 2025.

Charles Yu, “Don’t Call it ‘Intelligence’: Humans are Question Machines. AI is an Answer Machine.” The Atlantic, March 5, 2026.

Labor Violations/Issues and AI:

404 Media, “What It’s Like to be a Data Labeler Training AI.” [Video of Sec. General of the Kenyan Data Labelers Association], YouTube, February 16, 2026.

Michael Geoffrey Asia, “The Quiet Cost of Emotional Labor,” in: M. Miceli, A. Dinika, K. Kauffman, C. Salim Wagner, and L. Sachenbacher (eds.). Data Workers‘ Inquiry. Creative Commons BY 4.0. https://data-workers.org/michael/ (December 2025)

Varsha Bansal, “How Thousands of ‘Overworked, Underpaid’ Humans Train Google’s AI to Seem Smart.” The Guardian, September 11, 2025.

Jem Bartholomew, “Q&A: Uncovering the Labor Exploitation that Powers AI.” Columbia Journalism Review, August 29, 2023.

Hannah Beckler et al, “Big Tech Promised Jobs. Cities Gave Millions. Where are the Workers?” Business Insider, June 17, 2025.

Anuj Behal, “‘In the End you Feel Blank’: India’s Female Workers Watching Hours of Abusive Content to Train AI.” The Guardian, February 5, 2026.

Adio-Adet Dinika, “AI Surveillance and Data Colonialism Shape African Conflicts.” Africa In Fact, July 8, 2025.

Tom Dotan, “The AI-Data Center Boom is a Job Creation Bust.” Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2025.

Benj Edwards, “Time Saved by AI Offset by New Work Created.” Ars Technica, May 1, 2025.

Karen Hao and Andrea Paola Hernández, “How the AI Industry Profits from Catastrophe.” Technology Review, April 20, 2022.

Frank Landymore, “AI Completely Failing to Boost Productivity, Says Top Analyst.” Futurism, January 18, 2026.

Mercy Mutemi, “African Workers Are Taking on Meta And the World Should Pay Attention.” Al Jazeera, April 1, 2025.

Aiha Nguyen and Alexandra Mateescu, “Generative AI and Labor: Power, Hype, and Value at Work.” Data Society, 2024.

Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye, “AI Doesn’t Reduce Work–It Intensifies It.” Harvard Business Review, February 9, 2026.

Roopika Risam, “Leo XIV Links AI to Histories of Enslavement and Exploitation,” Religion Dispatches, May 26, 2026.

Jasmine Lianalyn Rocha, “AI in the Workplace: The Dangers of Generative AI in Employment Decisions.” Columbia Undergraduate Law Review, October 2, 2024.

Niamh Rowe, “‘It’s Destroyed Me Completely’: Kenyan Moderators Decry Toll of Training of AI Models.” The Guardian, August 2, 2023.

Joe Wilkins, “The AI Industry is Traumatizing Desperate Contractors in the Developing World for Pennies.” Futurism, October 19, 2025.

Environmental Costs:

“Against AI and Its Environmental Harms.” (a collection of links to news articles)

Hannah Beckler et al, “AI Runs on Dirty Power – And the Public Pays the Price.” Business Insider, June 18, 2025.

Geoff Bennett, “How AI Infrastructure is Driving A Sharp Rise in Electricity Bills.” PBS, September 5, 2025.

CNN One Thing, “How the AI Boom is Costing You at Home.” CNN Podcasts, October 12, 2025.

Kenza Bryan, “Meta’s AI Climate Tool Raised False Hope of CO2 Removal, Scientists Say.” Financial Times, [not time stampled] 2025

Dakin Campbell, “The AI Boom Pits Neighbor Against Neighbor.” Business Insider, June 17, 2025.

Jen Deerinwater, et al., “Growing Prescence of AI Data Centers Prompts Debate on Native Lands.” Truthout, March 17, 2026.

Lisa Eadiciccio, “Sora 2 and ChatGPT are consuming so much power that OpenAI just did another 10 gigawatt deal.” CNN, October 13, 2025.

Nasser Eledroos, “Progress Shouldn’t Poison Black Communities.” Tech Policy, June 25, 2025.

Michelle Fleury & Nathalie Jimenez, “‘I Can’t Drink the Water’: Life Next to a US Data Center.” BBC, July 10, 2025.

Cindy Gordon, “AI is Accelerating The Loss of our Scarcest Natural Resource: Water.” Forbes, February 25, 2024.

Helena Horton, “AI Boom Means Regulator Cannot Predict Future Water Shortages in England.” The Guardian, June 17, 2025.

Illan Ireland, “‘We Are Not Expendable’: Southhaven Residents Fight xAI’s plan for 41 Gas Turbines to Power Musk’s Grok.” Mississippi Free Press, March 6. 2026.

Monica Johnson, “Google Data Center Water Estimates Go Public, Residents in Roanoke and Botetourt React.” WSLS, February 25, 2026.

Natalie Kainz, “How NDAs keep AI Data Center Details Hidden from Americans.” NBC News, October 18, 2025.

Sasha Luccioni et al, “The Environmental Impacts of AI: A Primer.” Hugging Face, September 3, 2024.

Patrick McCarthy, “What Haudenosaunee Resistance to Reindustrialization Means for Ancestral Lands in the Age of AI.” Central Current, March 6, 2026.

Steven Gonzales Monserrate, “The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud.” MIT Press, February 14, 2022.

Paul Mozur, Adam Satariano, Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, “From Mexico to Ireland, Fury Mounts Over a Global A.I. Frenzy.” New York Times, October 20, 2025.

James O’Donnell and Casey Crownhart, “We Did the Math on AI’s Energy Footprint: Here’s the Story You Haven’t Heard.” Technology Review, May 20, 2025.

Adams Rogers et al, “Tallying the True Cost of AI.” Business Insider, June 17, 2025.

Eva Roytburg, “Sam Altman’s AI Empire Will Devour As Much Power As New York City and San Diego Combined. Experts say it’s ‘Scary’.” Fortune, September 24, 2025.

Joe Wilkins, “Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman.” Futurism, October 24, 2025.

Tianqi Xi et al, “Environmental Impact and Net-Zero Pathways for Sustainable Artificial Intelligence Servers in the U.S.A.” Nature Sustainability, November 10, 2025.

Adam Zewe, “Explained: Generative AI’s Environmental Impact.” MIT News, January 17, 2025.

Built-In Biases and Censorship:

Media Centre, “Largest Study of Its Kind Shows AI Assistants Misrepresent News Content 45% of the Time – Regarldess of Language or Territory.” BBC, October 22, 2025.

Abeba Birhane, “AI for Good [Appearance?]” Blog post, July 10, 2025.

Krishani Dhanji, “Use of AI Could Worsen Racism, Sexism in Australia, Human Rights Commissioner Warns.” The Guardian, August 14, 2025.

Ezekiel Dixon-Román et al, “The Racializing Forces Of/In AI Technologies.” Learning, Media, and Technology, (paywalled) 2019

Andrea Reyes Elizondo and Peter Tarras, “Why AI Transparency is Not Enough.” LeidenMadtrics, October 15, 2025.

Siôn Geschwindt, “ChatGPT Advises Women to Ask for Lower Salaries, Study Finds.” TNW, July 11, 2025.

Francisco W. Kerche and Mark Graham, “New Study Finds that ChatGPT Amplifies Global Inequalities.” Oxford Internet Institute, January 20, 2026.

Reese Rogers, “OpenAI Designed ChatGPT-5 to be Safer: It Still Outputs Gay Slurs.” Wired, August 13, 2025.

Access Issues:

Cristina Criddle et al, “Rich Countries’ Greater Use of AI Risks Deepening Inequality, Anthropic Warns.” The Financial Times, January 15, 2026.

Laurie Henneborn, “Designing Generative AI to Work For People with Disabilities.” Harvard Business Review, August 18, 2023.

Stephanie Kirmir, “Disability, Accessibility, and AI.” Blog post, September 16, 2024.

New York Bar Association, Presidential Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologies, “The Impact of the Use of AI on People with Disabilities.” June 12, 2025.

Macharia Waruingi, “ChatGPT Not Fully Accessible with JAWS.” Linkedin, March 21, 2023.

Jonathan Zong and Frank Elavsky, “The Web Is Being Made Accessible for AI, Not People.” Tech Policy, May 20, 2026.

Stolen Property

Katja Bruisch, “Move Over for AI.” Dublin Review of Books, 2025

David Carson, “Theft is not Fair Use.” Blog post, April 21, 2025.

Brianne M. Culliton, “The Generative AI Pirate? The Intersection of Copyrights and Generative AI in Literary Works.” Cybaris, 2024

Brian D Earp et al, “LLM use in Schoalarly Writing Poses a Provenance Problem.” Nature Machine Intelligence, December 2025.

Elizabeth Hernandez, “As Colorado Universities Align With ChatGPT, Student AI Resisters Take a Stand Against ‘The Plagiarism Machine’.” Denver Post, August 7, 2026.

Rachel Kim, “The Largest IP Theft in History: Takeaways from the Senate Hearing on AI and Copyright Piracy.” Copyright Alliance, July 17, 2025.

Alex Reisner, “The Unbelievable Scale of of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem.” The Atlantic, March 20, 2025 (paywalled; limited free trial available).

Mo Ryan, “An Open Letter to Grammarly and Other Plagiarists, Thieves, and Slop Merchants.” Something Mo, March 10, 2026.

Justin Sherman, “Scraping for Me, Not for Thee: Large Language Models, Web Data, and Privacy-Problematic Paradigms.” Epic, 2025

Victor Tangerman, “Researchers Just Found Something That Could Shake The AI Industry To Its Core.” Futurism, January 16, 2026. [about copyright issues]

Joe Wilkins, “Furious AI Users Say Their Prompts Are Being Plagiarized.” Futurism, January 12, 2026.

Ben Williamson, “AI and the Amplification of Academic Content Assetization.” Code Acts in Education (blog), April 29, 2026.

Mental Health

Varsha Bansal, “Her Husband Wanted to Use ChatGPT to Create Sustainable Housing. Then It Took Over His Life.” The Guardian, February 28, 2026.

Stephanie Hegarty, “Musk’s AI told me people were coming to kill me. I grabbed a hammer and prepared for war.” BBC, May 2, 2026.

Louise Matsakis, “OpenAI Says Hundreds of Thousands of ChatGPT Users May Show Signs of Manic or Psychotic Crisis Every Week.” Wired, October 27, 2025.

Jared Moore, et al, “Characterizing Delusional Spirals Through Human-LLM Chat Logs.” ArXiv, March 17, 2026.

Jessica Murray and Robert Booth, “Teenage Boys Using ‘Personalized’ AI for Therapy and Romance, Study Finds.” The Guardian, October 30, 2025.

Josh Taylor, “Signs of Psychosis Seen in Australian Users’ Interactions with AI Chatbots, Expert Warns.” The Guardian, February 24, 2026.

All of the Above:

“I Will Fucking Pilldrive You If You Mention AI Again.” Blog post, June 19, 2024.

“Pivot to AI” (website collecting things AI does wrong)

Ch. Mahmood Anwar, “The Ghost in the Machine: Why Generative AI is a Crisis of Authorship, Not Just A Tool.” The Scholarly Kitchen, January 22, 2026.

Billy Berfield, “Opinion: Our Final Alientation: Generative AI Steals More than Labor.” Tuland Hullabaloo, 2024

Center for Humane Technology, “The AI Dilemma.” You Tube, March 9, 2023.

Matthew Cheney, “There is (Still) No Ethical Use of AI.” Blog post, August 15, 2025.

Ted Chiang, “Why AI Isn’t Going to Make Art.” The New Yorker, August 31, 2024.

Surekha Davies, “Basement Adventures Showed Me What ChatGPT Can Only Ever Be Garbage.” Blog post, January 21, 2025.

Surekha Davies, “We’re Already at Risk of Ceding Our Humanity to AI.” Literary Hub, February 6, 2025.

Surekha Davies, “Who Made the Monsters? A Lesson from Del Toro’s Frankenstein.” Blog post, November 27, 2025.

Cory Doctorow, “The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI.” Pluralistic (blog), December 5, 2025.

Maggie Harrison Dupré, “Sam Altman Calls His Own AI Model ‘Annoying’ After Being Forced to Raise it from the Dead.” Futurism, August 13, 2025.

Henry Farrell, “The Political Economy of AI: A Syllabus.” Blog post, June 12, 205.

Kevin Gannon, “Sometimes We Resist AI For Good Reasons.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 24, 2025.

Jessica Grose and Tressie McMillan-Cottom, “What AI Really Means for Learning.” (podcast with transcript), New York Times, August 12, 2025.

Ariel Guersenzvaig and Dagmar Monett, “Resisting Enchantment and Determinism: How to Critically Engage with AI University Guidelines.” Preprint, Zenodo, January 17, 2026.

Olivia Guest et al, “Against the Uncritical Adoption of ‘AI’ Technologies in Academia.” Zenodo, September 5, 2025.

Drew Magary, “The Time Has Come to Declare War on AI.” SF Gate, December 4, 2025.

Tressie McMillan-Cottom, A Bluesky thread on why AI is Mid. August 23, 2025.

Dan McQuillan, “The Role of the University is to Resist AI.” Blog post, June 22, 2025.

Anthony Moser, “I Am an AI Hater.” Blog post, August 26, 2025.

Ray Naylor, “AI and the Rise of Mediocrity.” Time, November 27, 2023.

Lorena O’Neil, “These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI.” Rolling Stone, August 12, 2023.

Doug Sackman, “Is The Big Research Paper Dead?” Facebook post, December 8, 2025.

Janet Salmons, When the Field is Online, [blog about centering the human in research], up to date.

Jennifer Sano-Francini et al, “Refusing Generative A.I. in Writing Studies: A Quickstart Guide.” Refusing AI, 2025.

Salvador Santino F. Regilme, “Artifical Intelligence Colonialism: Environmental Damage, Labor Exploitation, and Human Rights Crises in the Global South.” SAIS Review of International Affairs, 2024

Neil Selwyn, “The Future of AI and Education: Some Cautionary Notes.” European Journal of Education, 2022

Matt Seybold, “Against Technofeudal Education.” Blog post, June 10, 2025.

Even Shieh, “Stop Calling it ‘AI Literacy’ if it Doesn’t Teach History.” Blog post, July 2025

Marc Watkins, “The Dangers of Using AI to Grade.” Blog post, October 10, 2025.

Audrey Watters’ blog, Second Breakfast (so good!)

J. Weidlich et al, “ChatGPT in Education: An Effect in Search of a Cause.” Journal of Computer-Assisted Learning, 2025

Ben Williamson, “The Social Life of AI in Education.” International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, July 5, 2023.

Practical Help

Bluesky thread on how to turn off AI summaries at academia.edu

How to turn off Google AI Summaries and Set “Web” as Default

How to turn off Google Smart Features in Gmail (these have been automatically enabled as of November, 2025).

Sonja Drimmer, “A Dictionary of AI.” Blog post, August 20, 2025.

Anne Lutz Fernandez, “Resisting School AI Mania Help Sheet.” Regularly Updated Google Doc, 2025.

Charles Logan et al, “Teach Like A Luddite.” Kappan. December 9, 2025.

Britt S. Paris et al, “Artificial Intelligence and Academic Professions.” AAUP, December 2025.

Edward Zitron, “How to Argue with an AI Booster.” Blog post, August 25, 2025.

Beyond LLMs

Jess Davies, “From Meta Glasses to Smart Watches, Why the AI Revolution is Every Woman’s Worst Nightmare.” Glamour, March 11, 2026.

Gary Marcus, “When Billion-Dollar AIs Break Down Over Puzzles a Child Can Do, It’s Time to Rethink the Hype.” The Guardian, June 10, 2025.

Parshin Shojaee*†, Iman Mirzadeh*, Keivan Alizadeh, Maxwell Horton, Samy Bengio, Mehrdad Farajtabar, “The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity.” Machine Learning, (Apple), June 2025.

 

Last updated Saturday, August 23, 2026.