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Around 25 people gathered at Hyderabad’s Jalagam Vengal Rao Park on Saturday evening, September 5. The reason? To hold a picnic, laugh and collectively hate on generative Artificial Intelligence (AI).
All these people were responding to a call put out by There is No Earth B, a climate action group, on its Instagram page. The post had invited residents of Hyderabad to join in on what they called the ‘AI haters’ picnic’.
“It concerns me that AI is stealing existing work and adversely affecting artists. All creative jobs are going downhill. As someone who studied neuroscience, I am also concerned that AI is diverting funds away from science. I understand using AI as part of research, but it makes little sense to use it in toto instead of hiring an actual person,” Siddharth, a 25-year-old attendee, told TNM.
Seated next to Siddharth, 24-year-old Manaswini, who works with an NGO on fundraising and partnership, made a case for how one way to combat AI was to reaffirm the need for a community.
“I studied psychology, so I also see how AI has forced isolation. There is an AI-induced psychosis going around,” she said, referring to the ongoing concerns voiced by psychologists of how prolonged interactions with AI could enable delusional thinking. “One way to tackle that thinking is to remove the echo chambers AI puts us in,” she added.
“Broadly, there isn’t enough hate for AI,” Tushar, the organiser of the event, told TNM. “Vizag is raging against AI as it should. But in cities like Hyderabad and Bengaluru, the hate is minimal, which is why I organised the picnic. We are so keen on our tech culture that we just cannot bring ourselves to see how this affects us unequally. It also collides with any attempts at climate justice,” he added.
Tushar was referring to how AI has been heavily criticised for the massive amounts of energy and water it consumes, adversely impacting marginalised communities. The picnic in Hyderabad was held a day before the People’s Convention on Data Centres meeting in Visakhapatnam.
In an irreverent attempt to reaffirm distaste for AI, the attendees organised a game. As they passed food around the park’s gazebo, each attendee came up with imaginary or rhetorical scenarios while the rest shouted out bad answers – the way AI was likely to answer. Questions like “How do you decide whose opinion to value?” or “What do you do if your car breaks down?” were met with silly/cheeky answers like “decide based on their height” or “stop in the middle of a flyover and call your ex-boyfriend for help.”
The picnic ended with attendees making paper planes and flying them around. “I came here because I was curious, and I had never been to picnics,” Irfan, a law student and climate activist, told TNM. “But there is a fear of AI, and I really wanted to understand how people were engaging with it.”
Irfan’s concerns, like those of several attendees, are not unfounded. At the end of the picnic, as several people made paper planes to cap the evening off, one attendee told TNM about how she had personal experience with AI-induced delusion.
“I take care of a relative of mine who has had mental health issues for a while now. At a heightened state of mania, she went about having conversations with AI and believed that she was speaking to a very well-known celebrity. I shudder to think what would have happened if I didn’t chance upon those conversations and bring up concerns. It is harmful, and there aren’t enough people who understand the perils of gen AI,” she said.
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