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, which ranged from the conspiracy-adjacent (that data centers emitted infrasound below the threshold of human hearing, inducing 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 march: “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.”
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.
