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Stop shaming people for using AI. Start organizing to prevent our obsolescence | Garrison Lovely

I don’t need to tell you that people hate AI. The list of grievances is long: slop, cheating, bias, enfeeblement, electricity bills, environmental destruction, exploitation, theft, cybercrime, doom. But resistance to the technology has often taken the form of shaming people for personally using it, with precious little organizing against the companies building the machines. This is perplexing, given that those companies are attempting to render us obsolete. The executives may contest this framing, offering some…

By the Truvace desk2 min read1 sourceJournalismTRV-2026-1527· cite & verify
Stop shaming people for using AI. Start organizing to prevent our obsolescence | Garrison Lovely

In brief

In a Guardian opinion column published in September 2026, author Garrison Lovely argues that opponents of AI spend too much energy shaming individual users and too little organizing against the companies building AGI. He cites OpenAI's and Anthropic's own statements as evidence that the goal is labor replacement.

The argument matters because it reframes AI resistance as a question of democratic control rather than consumer purity, and it urges engagement with the technology so critics are present when policymakers decide. Whether a movement can grow strong enough to freeze frontier development, or whether AGI will ever succeed, remains unresolved and is the author's view rather than a measured outcome.

Main points

  1. Lovely cites OpenAI's AGI definition and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's description of AI as a general labor substitute as proof of the industry's aim.
  2. He calls for freezing frontier AI development until there is strong public buy-in and broad scientific consensus on safety and controllability.
  3. He says using AI is not an endorsement of the industry and that non-users risk ceding influence to those who do use it.
  4. He reports that sixty-nine active members of Congress have publicly used terms like artificial superintelligence or AI existential risk.
  5. Irreplaceable.org is organizing a national walkout to Freeze AI on 20 October.

The problem

AI companies are explicitly pursuing systems meant to outperform humans at most economically valuable work, threatening livelihoods, while governance sits with unaccountable tech executives.

The rundown

The column contends that shame-based resistance fractures opponents and casts them as consumers, comparing it to BP's promotion of the carbon footprint to shift blame for climate change onto individuals. Lovely urges people to think as citizens asking how to govern the technology democratically.

As an example of productive use, he notes that policy analyst Matt Bruenig is having Claude Code build a public, automatically updating database of National Labor Relations Board decisions, while bosses may use the same tool to replace workers.

He quotes Joshua Achiam and Dean Ball saying the left has abdicated its role in the AI discussion. Lovely discloses that he serves on the Irreplaceable non-profit board and is donating his share of the book's royalties to it.

Sources

  1. JournalismThe Guardian2026-09-29

The debate