“[T]here can be alternatives. What we can imagine is, rather than the ChatGPT killer, a lot of different little AIs from little responsible players.”

That’s me, in The Guardian a few days ago, trying to distill a message that I’ve been trying to get out as broadly as possible for quite a while now. It's sort of like hoping a comet will take out the major AI players and a bunch of smaller new players will be the smarter, better-adapted mammals that take their place instead.

We’re in another one of those big inflection points for AI. Trump administration policymakers for AI suspended access to Anthropic’s newest product. All of these policymakers have a web of investments in competing players — including SpaceX, which is about to IPO — and the corruption and grift of this cohort are so extensive that it’s impossible to judge what the actual risks and reality are around any of these platforms or technologies, since no one involved is an honest broker.

It’s a shame

More broadly, there’s been the widespread pushback against AI culturally, one that is undeniably strongest amongst those who were born in this century. But the adoption patterns and usage data show that even younger people are using some AI tools. And that’s a pattern that we’ve seen before, with social media. We have a significant group of people knowing that a technology contradicts some of their values, preferences, or beliefs, but using it anyway.

Sometimes it’s due to the coercive nature of the platforms themselves, and how they insinuate themselves into our lives, to the point where we don’t even realize we’re using them. Sometimes they are forced upon us by the creators of the platforms, since they have so much power over the devices we use, and the tools that we rely on for things like doing our jobs, or communicating with our loved ones or our communities.

There are millions of people who don’t like that they’re using LLMs provided by the Big AI companies, but end up using them anyway. Just like there are hundreds of millions of people who don’t like that they’re on the giant social networking platforms like Facebook, but end up using them anyway. The feelings that people walk away from those experiences with are often guilt, or shame, or embarrassment, or resentment — all some of the most negative and destructive emotions that humans can experience.

Actual alternatives

But if people want to get the benefits of some of these technologies, without either the shame of supporting the harms of Big AI, or the unpredictability of being beholden to corrupt billionaires bickering with one another, there are finally starting to be other options. As I mentioned in (One) Good AI Is Here, it’s possible for creators working in their own communities to now make AI tools that serve their specific needs, without causing all the harms that make people object to Big AI.

This feels like the true alternative to the narrative of “inevitability” that so much of the hyper-funded AI industry is trying to push, while also not forcing people into a quiet life of AI guilt if they still find some utility in some aspects of these tools.

Right now, those who (rightly!) object to Big AI due to their platforms’ impact on the environment, or labor, or their extractive use of content without consent, or its many other potential harms, are generally not aware of, or often open to, the idea of there being small, human-scale tools created by and for communities that are accountable for those tools over time. But my suspicion is that it is not only possible to make these tools, there may in fact already be many of these tools in existence, and we’re just not as familiar with them because they’ve been quietly serving their specific niches without having multi-billion-dollar campaigns promoting them.

What I'm unabashedly hoping to do (and I think the Guardian story reflects some momentum in that regard), is shift the narrative from focusing on running away from the bad thing in AI, to finding the good thing that we're running toward. There are alternatives that we could be affirmatively choosing, ones that look at questions like the one I asked more than a year ago, "[https://www.anildash.com/2025/05/01/what-would-good-ai-look-like/](What Would "Good" AI Look Like?")", and offer answers that might give us hope instead of just the righteous rage and anger we feel when we let our imaginations be constrained by the limits of what Big AI offers.