This article was originally published on LinkedIn, March 13th, 2026. Archived here for posterity and accessibility.

I am a creative, working in the events industry. I watch the conversations. I read the posts, the panels, the comment threads. What strikes me, over and over, is how much energy goes into talking around the defining issue of our time without ever naming it.

People are discussing the consequences: Budget pressures. Shifting audience expectations. Workforce challenges. Political tensions. Misinformation. Security threats. These are all real, and they all matter. They’re also symptoms. We keep treating them as if they’re the disease.

Worse, some of the loudest voices in our professional spaces are managing to commandeer disproportionate attention on trifling issues: protracted disputes over regulatory minutiae and governance structures that, even in the most generous interpretation, could yield only marginal improvements. Meanwhile, the ground is moving beneath all of us and almost nobody is looking down.

The disease is AI. Specifically, AI driven warfare, in every sense of that word: information warfare, cultural warfare, political manipulation at industrial scale, and of course, increasingly the kinetic kind of warfare too: Autonomous weapons systems. Mass surveillance infrastructure. The merger of corporate technology and state military power is happening right now, at speed, in plain sight.

I understand why people aren’t engaging with this directly. The horror is too vast. The points of connection between these things, the threads that link a chatbot on your phone to an autonomous drone to the collapse of shared political reality, are too numerous and too complex for any human mind to hold simultaneously. The irony being that these connections are trivial for an AI to map. We built the thing that can comprehend the problems we can’t.

This isn’t just the events industry. It’s civil society at large. It’s our political leaders, many of whom still treat AI as a niche technology issue rather than the most consequential development in human history. They’re debating the colour of the curtains while the building is on fire.

Across every sector, well meaning people, people whose instincts and values I broadly share, are refusing to engage with AI at all. They see it as a monolith. Something created by corporations they distrust, for purposes they find repellent, and they want no part of it. I understand the impulse. I wrote about it almost a year ago in an article called Outcoded (assisted, ironically, by ChatGPT, back when Sam Altman was still a saint). In it, I argued that a dangerous asymmetry was emerging: people who care about ethics, justice, and collective responsibility were largely disengaging from AI, while those with fewer scruples were adopting it aggressively, at scale, for persuasion, manipulation, and profit.

The thoughtful were retreating. The reckless were advancing. The gap was widening.

A year on, with Iran and its neighbours ablaze, terrorist incidents spiking and the global economy teetering, it seems I was too optimistic.

The gap hasn’t widened. It has become a chasm. It needs to be spelt out plainly, because this is the part that the “AI is not for me” crowd needs to hear: If you reject AI on principle, you don’t make it go away. You gift it to the people who have no principles at all. Every day you choose not to understand these tools, someone with worse intentions gets more fluent with them. They’re not debating the ethics. They’re building the infrastructure of political control, and the tools you refuse to touch are the ones making it possible. That is how “we” lose. Not in a dramatic final battle, but gradually, silently, by ceding every inch of the information landscape to people who do not share our values.

Let me make it concrete. The same Sam Altman who compared Trump to Hitler in 2016 [1] donated a million dollars to his inauguration fund [2]. His company’s president gave $25 million to MAGA Inc. [3] When Anthropic , the company behind the AI assistant Claude, refused to sign a Pentagon contract because it wouldn’t agree to mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons [4], OpenAI swooped in within hours to take the deal [5]. Trump blacklisted Anthropic as a supply chain threat to national security [5]. OpenAI’s own CEO admitted the whole thing was rushed and looked “opportunistic and sloppy” [6]. A senior robotics lead resigned over it [7].

This is what a ChatGPT subscription funds. Direct financial and technological support for an authoritarian political project, delivered by a company whose leadership has made clear that it considers ethical red lines an inconvenience.

I cancelled my OpenAI subscription. I now work with Claude, which is at least as capable as ChatGPT for my purposes and, in many respects, better. The transition wasn’t painless: retraining a new AI from scratch, losing some established workflows, adjusting to a different set of strengths and limitations, but it was 100% worth it. The makers of this tool demonstrated, at enormous commercial cost, that they meant what they said about their red lines. That matters infinitely more to me than basic convenience. The #QuitGPT movement already has over a million people taking action [8], and it exists because these choices matter.

This is not primarily a consumer boycott argument.

For those already engaging with AI but not thinking about where their money goes: not all AI is the same. Not all AI companies share the same values, answer to the same people, or make the same choices about what their technology should be used for. Some are drawing lines. Some are erasing them. You’ll never know which is which if you won’t even take a look.

For those refusing to engage at all: the longer you leave it, the worse it gets. Not just for the world, but for you, personally. Every month you spend looking the other way, these tools advance further, the learning curve steepens, and the gap between you and those who are fluent grows wider. The people who understand AI will shape the future. The people who don’t will be shaped by it, increasingly bewildered, increasingly disempowered, and increasingly surplus to requirements.

Here is what I need everybody to understand: people in the events industry, in civil society, in public life. Artists. Writers. Musicians. Thought leaders. Politicians. Everybody.

AI driven information warfare is not a future threat. It is current, operational, and effective. It is why public discourse feels so fractured, why trust is collapsing, why political reality itself seems to be disintegrating. Autonomous weapons are not science fiction. They are in contract negotiations, in deployment pipelines, right now. Mass surveillance infrastructure, powered by the same AI tools people use to write emails and generate social media posts, is being built with the explicit cooperation of the companies that built those tools. These are not separate issues. They are one interconnected system, and it is moving faster than any individual can track, which is precisely why most people look away and focus on smaller, more manageable problems instead. Governance structures. Regulatory turf wars. Professional feuds that generate heat but no light. It’s displacement activity, and it is costing humanity time that we simply do not have.

I wrote in Outcoded that the answer was engagement, not retreat. I still think that. The tone, however, has to change.

Love, light, and kindness are beautiful values. They are not, on their own, a strategy. Not now. Not when the other side is wielding the most powerful technology ever created with no hesitation and no conscience. What’s needed is the harder version: peace that is actively defended. Justice that is demanded and enforced. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion that are treated as structural imperatives, not slogans for a lanyard. The difference between hoping for a better world and building one.

The events industry talks a lot about safer spaces. Civil society talks a lot about values. Political leaders talk a lot about everything except the thing that is reshaping the world beneath their feet. It’s time for us all to stop talking around it.

#QuitGPT. Get real about AI. Learn the tools. Choose the right ones. Understand who profits from your engagement and your ignorance. Stop investing energy in peripheral disputes when the fundamental architecture of democratic society is being rewritten by people who do not share our values and do not care about our objections.

We could be in the first hours of something extraordinary, or the final hours of everything we thought was permanent. Either way, the time for sitting this one out has passed.

Written by Ben Kidd, with collaborative input from Anthropic’s Claude.

Ben Kidd is a creative consultant working across the events, security, and crowd management sectors. His previous article on AI engagement, Outcoded, was published in May 2025.

#AI #CancelGPT #QuitGPT #Events #CivilSociety #AIWarfare #AutonomousWeapons #Democracy #Ethics #CrowdManagement #EventProfs

References

[1] ABC News. “OpenAI’s Sam Altman once warned America about Trump. Now he’s partnering with him.” https://abcnews.com/US/openais-sam-altman-warned-america-trump-now-partnering/story?id=118145337

[2] Associated Press / Yahoo Finance. “OpenAI’s Altman will donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.” https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openais-altman-donate-1-million-173541733.html

[3] Brennan Center for Justice. “Pro-Trump Super PAC Raises Record-Breaking $305 Million.” https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/pro-trump-super-pac-raises-record-breaking-305-million

[4] NPR. “OpenAI announces Pentagon deal after Trump bans Anthropic.” https://www.npr.org/2026/02/27/nx-s1-5729118/trump-anthropic-pentagon-openai-ai-weapons-ban

[5] MIT Technology Review. “OpenAI’s ‘compromise’ with the Pentagon is what Anthropic feared.” https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/02/1133850/openais-compromise-with-the-pentagon-is-what-anthropic-feared/

[6] CNBC. “OpenAI’s Altman admits defense deal ‘looked opportunistic and sloppy’ amid backlash.” https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/03/openai-sam-altman-pentagon-deal-amended-surveillance-limits.html

[7] TechCrunch. “OpenAI hardware exec Caitlin Kalinowski quits in response to Pentagon deal.” https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/07/openai-robotics-lead-caitlin-kalinowski-quits-in-response-to-pentagon-deal/

[8] Euronews. “‘Cancel ChatGPT’: AI boycott surges after OpenAI-Pentagon military deal.” https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/03/02/cancel-chatgpt-ai-boycott-surges-after-openai-pentagon-military-deal