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Research on adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in popular media, has framed resistance largely as a barrier to innovation and progress. Resisters have been labelled ignorant, anti-progress or Luddites. Frequently resistance originates in the most marginalized communities of racial minorities, who are for example subject to wrongful arrests due to facial recognition technology. But it also can come from unions and the general public in the Global North. The Canadian public, for example, is the most skeptical of Western countries of AI. Overall, the public’s voice can be rendered invisible in the face of governments’ drive towards achieving competitive advantage in AI or sovereign AI as well as media’s support for that narrative. In the shadow of that dominant discourse, research and practice has explored citizen resistance to information and communication technologies as a form of ethical and civic contestation, arising from legitimate concerns about surveillance, opacity, inequity, as well as environmental damage. Our study explores reactions of these residents’, predominantly in the Global North, to AI by examining grey literature including news reports, blog articles, videos and podcasts to find instances of citizen pushback against AI. This research shifts attention toward non-expert and civil society organization responses guided by the following question: "What are the ways in which citizens resist and push back against AI in everyday life?
From these real-world examples, we develop a taxonomy organized around three main dimensions: methods of pushback, motivating concerns, and types of AI being resisted. By tracing these forms of resistance, we draw insights about the reasons behind citizen reactions, the ways in which they are expressed, and the manner of pushback. These taxonomies are not mutually exclusive. For instance, methods of pushback can apply across types of AI, for example physical protests against algorithms used to distribute social welfare or against water usage by data centres. This work also allows us to observe how media coverage shapes our understanding of public reactions surrounding emerging AI technologies and our understanding of civic pushback. The way resistance is discussed, why civic participation is portrayed the way it is, and how public action is tied to the systems and concerns that AI technologies are highlighted and discussed in relation to journalist and media coverage. Our hope is that these insights lead to incorporate of this resistance into AI governance discourse as a form of pushback against the discourse and lead the public and private sectors to follow suit and resist some forms of AI as well.