NEW YORK, NEW YORK—Mid-morning one Friday in May, when it was clear to just about everyone that Artificial Intelligence would be eating the world for the foreseeable future, a group of about forty folk gathered in New York’s Sara D. Roosevelt Park, in the Lower East Side. Some were younger, a few were older, others were wearing colored conical hats, which identified them as members of a Luddite collective, and a handful wore yellow vests that identified them as being—loosely—in charge. They wore their hair long, short, under armpits. They wore masks and sunglasses and masks and no glasses and balaclavas and, mostly, no masks at all. 

Among this latter group, Bryce Robinson, a young engineer with round glasses and a twenty-seven-year-old’s open face, had come from New Jersey to attend a block party against AI, and specifically the company OpenAI, which runs the popular chatbot ChatGPT. “The growing pains are faster and stronger than anything we have seen before,” Robinson said. “The rate of change of the industry is bigger than what our lawmakers and our legislature can keep up with.” He compared AI companies to Victorian businesses that used child labor: “The companies then were lobbying against regulation, they were trying to keep things as profitable as possible. I think we are in that era for AI: the AI companies are keeping it intentionally hard to legislate.”

The invitation, some might say incitement, to protest came from a handful of groups—QuitGPT, Sunrise NYC, Luddites of NYC, Climate Revolution Action Network NJ, and 50501NY—who were calling for “a mass boycott of ChatGPT and for OpenAI to cease its efforts to buy elections, including in NY12.” 

Pro-AI super PACs are spending big this election cycle, and they are led by Leading the Future, a group that is funded by several people close to OpenAI. Think Big, a sub-PAC of Leading the Future (we know it’s confusing—it’s meant to be) has spent at least $2.4 million against Alex Bores, a candidate in the race for New York’s Twelfth Congressional District. 

What did Bores do to get the tech overlords so sore? He’s pushing for AI regulation. “AI companies,” Robinson said, “are supporting candidates who are not just pro-AI but candidates who keep their mouths shut. They want to keep things the way that it is so that they can sprint ahead.”

Danger lurked around every corner. Some of the activists said their email accounts had been hacked. One masked young man came up to Robinson and began to extemporize on how OpenAI’s affiliates were trying to warp the news using an entirely AI-generated news website called The Wire by Acutus. Even Now Voyager’s correspondent came in for scrutiny, but a handy knowledge of shorthand and a quick demonstration of an analog camera saved him much approbation from the technophobes in the crowd.

At another point, Your Faithful Correspondent was accosted by a frog-faced puppet bearing a badge that identified him as Sam Altman. “I’m here today because I saw this beautiful park and I thought, wow, what a great place to build a data center,” his ventriloquist, in sunglasses and a balaclava, said. “So I want to get as many people as possible to build a giant data center.” 

As “Altman” spoke, young people taped cardboard boxes together into a makeshift “data center.” Messages like 

OPEN AI WILL HAVE THEIR TECH RUN IN AUTOMATED DRONES, WHICH WILL MURDER WITHOUT HUMAN INPUT, SHAME

were Sharpied onto the cardboard. The chatter was that they would bear the data center toward OpenAI’s New York headquarters, at the Puck Building in Soho.

Shortly after noon, Kyle Barnes, a member of the Luddites, led a ritual in which a young man in a fawn shirt deleted ChatGPT from his phone (“I feel like my shoulders are lighter”). Then the group gathered for a mock exorcism of Altman’s puppet before they hefted the cardboard “data center” aloft and began to stream west toward Soho. “FUNDING WAR OVERSEAS,” they chanted, “GET OFF CHATGPT.”

As they marched, Now Voyager took the temperature of the crowd. “I’m against AI being used in weapons automated to kill people,” Skyler Chaikin, a twenty-three-year-old protester, said. For Barnes, there was an even more basic reason to be against AI: “It’s bad for democracy!” 

Among the marchers was Eliot Lambert, a twenty-seven-year-old artist from London. She is not a Luddite, but she likes to attend their events. “I love how the Luddites are very silly and satirical; I like how they are using satire to cut into big issues; I like how their actions are public,” she said. But what were her thoughts on AI? “As a creative I’m conscious that I use it—it’s hollowing out my mind!”

At the Puck building, protesters mugged for photographs on the steps before a set of security guards in black baseball caps stepped out of the building’s glass doors: “Get off! This is private property!” An NYPD officer looked on nervously, but the protesters kept it silly. 

“We’re closing them down,” a Luddite in a green hat told the crowd. “We’re kicking them out of New York so we can open up a new frontier for ourselves!”