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arXiv · 2512.24863

Big AI is accelerating the metacrisis: What can we do?

Steven Bird
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Abstract

The world is in the grip of ecological, meaning, and language crises that are converging into a metacrisis. Big AI is accelerating them all. LLM engineering sits at the core. Despite the public good motives of language engineers and the promise of LLMs, this work is being leveraged to create unprecedented wealth and power for a handful of individuals and corporations while causing existential harm to life on earth. As a profession, we urgently need to come together to explore alternatives and to design a life-affirming future for our field of natural language processing that is centered on human flourishing on a living planet.

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Steven Bird. 2025-12-31. Big AI is accelerating the metacrisis: What can we do?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24863

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