Boycott AI

Day after day, more companies are announcing plans to cut human workers in favor of AI "assistants". To cut out human artists and replace them with AI slop. To organize mass misinformation campaigns on social media and the Internet. And quite honestly -- I've lost track of how many companies I want to boycott over this.

So I'm making a list. This list is not just for any company that "uses AI" -- it's for (what I see as) the worst. And for each company is a list of alternatives, and evidence of harms caused by their use of AI. This is actively being updated -- so expect more as time goes on. You can find that below; note that ordering is alphabetical. If you have a company you want to suggest for inclusion, please see the inclusion criteria and contact information below. I also have a bunch of extra information on companies in this list below, if you are interested in more details on alternatives and reasoning for their inclusion.

AI Boycott List

Company and Core Services AI-based Harm Alternatives Evidence
Amazon
(Amazon Prime, Alexa) 		AI creation, Datacenter abuse, Privacy invasion Local stores Reuters, Business Insider, Reuters, Reuters
Coca-Cola
 Replacing humans Locally-made drinks Business Insider
Facebook / Meta
(Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger) 		Privacy invasion, AI creation Messaging:
Signal

Group chat:
Discord Socials:
Cara, diVine (once available) 		Business Insider, The Guardian
Google
(Google Chrome, Google Search, Google Gemini, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs / Slides / etc) 		Carbon emissions, Privacy invasion, AI creation Browsers:
Firefox, Brave

Email:
Proton Mail

File Sharing and Storage:
Proton Drive

Office:
LibreOffice

Search engines:
Ecosia, DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Brave 		AOL, The Guardian, Wikipedia
Hasbro
(Dungeons and Dragons, Magic: the Gathering, Battleship, Candy Land, Twister, etc...) 		Replacing humans TTRPGs:
Pathfinder, Prowlers and Paragons, Triangle Agency

Other games:
Check your local game store 		PCGamer, PCGamer
Microsoft
(Xbox, Outlook, Bing, Office, Word, Teams, OneNote, OneDrive, CoPilot) 		AI creation, Datacenter Abuse, Privacy invasion Email:
Proton Mail

Office:
LibreOffice

File Sharing and Storage:
Proton Drive

Gaming:
Steam Deck, Steam Machine 		TechRadar, TechRadar, Futurism
Twitter / X
(Grok, Grokopedia) 		AI creation Socials:
Bluesky, Cara

Wikis:
Wikipedia 		The Verge, Tech Republic

Notes

Amazon

Amazon has a ton of revenue sources. Huge amounts of them are not consumer facing -- Amazon runs one of the largest datacenter networks, which supports a huge amount of websites, data storage, and AI online. That gets them tons of money -- even before we look at Amazon sales to individuals. Amazon also often has items that are hard to find elsewhere. From my perspective, the idea here should be about minimizing how much you buy from them. Try to find the same (or similar) item from other stores -- local or online -- and only go to Amazon if you cannot. Like everything on this list -- every bit helps. And it's better for 100 people to boycott "imperfectly", than for one person to do so "perfectly".

Google

Like Amazon, Google has a ton of sources of revenue. Online, their primary source is via privacy invasion (ads and training AIs on user data). If you do use Google, at the very least do not use Google Chrome (Brave and Firefox are good alternatives). And, if you are on Firefox, install an ad-blocker like uBlock Origin (Brave has an ad-blocker built-in). This way, Google will have less of an ability to profit off of you.

Microsoft

I'm not recommending boycotting Windows as an operating system. If you want to go above and beyond on this one, swapping out your Windows install for Linux is great for privacy (and usability!). But that's not easy and requires a lot of technical knowledge (that many will find boring) -- so it's not logical to recommend to everyone. For anyone looking for a gaming alternative, the Steam Deck (and upcoming Steam Machine) can run most games that run on Windows, and are Linux-based out-of-the-box (also -- they are super easy to use!).

Social Media

All social media is pretty terrible with respect to privacy and AI, except a few fringe ones that most people do not use. However, the purpose of social media is to connect -- which means using the "common" ones is ultimately necessary if you want social media at all. Luckily, we do know how to prevent social medias from profiteering off of (as much). Most of this centres around disrupting the "click economy":

Not Included

AI-only companies

There are a huge number of companies whose only offering is AI (OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Stability.ai,, MidJourney etc). These are not added onto the list for two reasons:
  1. They are so clearly AI-based that anyone seeking to boycott AI would likely already be boycotting them. Adding them to the list would add confusion, not clarity.
  2. For the most part (except for OpenAI's ChatGPT and MidJourney) they tend to be relatively unknown to the majority of people, failing the "at least 1 in 10" rule used to focus only on companies that we can collectively target.

Adobe

Adobe faced huge backlash for using planning to train AI on users' data, but has since backed down (see here). That said, they still are very pro-AI (see the Adobe Newsroom) -- they just don't seem to be stealing data for it. If you still want to use non-Adobe (for this or any number of other reasons) there are some great free / open-source alternatives out there: Gimp, InkScape, and Krita. But since Adobe has already had backlash, and backed down from the worst of what they did with AI, it does not make sense to keep them on the boycott list.

Marvel Comics

Marvel Comics has been accused of using AI -- but currently, I have not found definitive evidence as to their general stance on AI. That said, DC Comics has promised to never use AI (see ), so if you prefer to be extra sure, go with them.

Inclusion Criteria

There are a ton of companies that use AI -- and an ton again who drive immense harms through that use. This list is intended, however, to be for a consumer boycott. It's also meant to be for companies that people might not know use AI. Specifically, companies on this list must meet the following criteria:
  1. Use of AI in a particularly harmful way. Many companies use AI -- this list aims to focus on those that are driving the most immediate harms.
  2. Be generally available to consumers. Many companies that use AI primarily have corporate partners, not private consumers. Boycotting such companies is of less effect.
  3. Be at least moderately popular. If fewer than 1 in 10 people are aware of the company, then including them here will have little effect. The goal is to focus on targets that are easy to collectively act on.
Finally, for suggested alternatives I do my best to avoid companies that are on other boycott lists. That said, I might make some mistakes there -- please bear with with if I do, and feel free to reach out about alternatives that are subject to other boycotts.

Suggestions

If you want to suggest a company for inclusion here, you can contact me at jeffreysardina [at] duck [full stop] com. Please include:
  1. The name of the company
  2. A 1-2 sentence description of how they are using AI in a particularly harmful way. Some examples: spreading misinformation, producing high carbon emissions or other environmental harms, or replacing human jobs.
  3. An list of alternate companies that provide similar services and do not use AI. This part is critical -- if there is not something to replace the company with, then this list will have far less value.
  4. Verifiable evidence from for the above (for example, news media). If you link to a company page rather than news media, please provide an archive.org or similar link to the version of the webpage in which the company admits AI use, to prevent it from being taken down or changed later.
If you want to suggest the removal of an alternative (for example, because it is on another boycott list) then please reach out with:
  1. A verifiable reference to the Boycott list the company is on. Ideally this should include a short explanation as to include why the company is on that list as well.
  2. If possible, alternatives that are not on the boycott list in question