As I walked into homeroom on a random Tuesday in November, I saw a slidedeck pulled up on the screen and a few presenters who started telling us about all the possibilities that AI might provide. I was expecting to work on my math homework that morning, but my classmates and I were instead told to set up Gemini accounts to prompt the chatbot about cookie recipes with local flavors. As I logged in for the first time, I felt swept away by an inescapable force. AI in that moment seemed inevitable and unavoidable.

As AI develops, ethical use and technology’s effects on communities continue to change. As Imua previously reported, ‘Iolani students are increasingly reliant on AI as they rise through higher grade levels at school. While AI is often presented as a necessary, educational tool, what is less obvious is the increasingly devastating impact it has on marginalized groups across the globe–via environmental damage, labor exploitation and erasure of languages and cultures. In 2026, AI companies are most committed to empire-building and maximization of profit. They want us all to think that AI is inescapable and a necessity for everyday life. And the more we believe this, the less we will question these companies and the current practices they are using to colonize the world.

AI models we use daily are based in data centers that steal clean water and land from communities that already lack these resources. In “Plundered Earth,” chapter 12 of Empire of AI, author Karen Hao writes about how the community of Cerrillos in Chile protested against Google after discovering that one of its proposed data centers would use massive amounts of fresh drinking water, which data centers use for cooling servers and preventing overheating. Powerful protests were organized through the work of the water activist group, MOSACAT. Alejandra Salinas, a member of MOSACAT, explained, “[Google is] not going to come and use the water, which is vital for life, and leave [us] with nothing.” Through continued pressure from MOSACAT and the local government, Google was eventually forced out of Chile. The company has since turned its sights to Uruguay instead.

As Google built data centers in Uruguay, a drought forced local governments to mix brackish water into the city’s drinking supply to avoid cutting water from households across the city altogether. Coupled with the data center’s use of fresh drinking water, Uruguayans were forced to buy bottled water and some turned to ollas, local food shelters and soup kitchens. The head of an olla, Fabiana, recalls that even the ollas found it difficult to keep serving food and water to their communities: “To have to say, ‘I don’t even have a little plate for your child…’’ She trails off. ‘It was horrible.’” While Fabiana grew up in poverty, she still saw this drought as one of the worst times of her life. The environmental consequences of AI are felt the hardest by lower income communities, already struggling with access to basic resources and necessities for survival.

Not only do AI companies take land and clean water, but they also actively exploit marginalized communities for cheaper labor, a factor that many people who simply log on to ChatGPT or Gemini daily may not know at all. Large tech companies, including Meta, OpenAI and Google, outsource AI training work from developing countries because they can pay less for labor in those regions. According to TIME, the humans doing this AI training are paid by the task, often ranging from just cents to a few dollars per day.

Workers in Nairobi report being given increasingly more disturbing content to review on a daily basis. An anonymous worker in Nairobi, speaking of the prompts that her employer company gave her to chat with AI about, stated, “It will give a question: ‘Describe cannibalism.’ You have to put yourself in the shoes of the chatbot and chat with it.” She also referenced being shown videos of beheadings in order to teach AI how to safely and appropriately respond to users’ questions about this type of subject matter.

Joan Kinyua, a single mother living in Nairobi, was a content moderator working to review photos, videos, and other forms of media until her employer, Remotasks, suddenly ceased operations in Kenya without warning. Workers like Kinyua were suddenly out of jobs with no notice, and with no way to effectively contact their remote employer. Only after losing her job and joining the Content Moderators Union in Africa, was Kinyua finally able to access a therapist who helped her realize “that the content that [she’s] been exposed to has affected [her] to a point that [she] did not even know.”

After stealing land and water and exploiting marginalized workers across the globe, AI companies amass the power necessary to perpetuate the final frontier of empire-building–the erasure of indigenous languages and culture. According to Karen Hao, “Only the most common languages have enough speakers—and enough profit potential—for Big Tech to collect the data needed to support them.” AI training approaches that rely on Western-dominated data sets often erase and misinterpret cultural practices and languages. Native speakers of indigenous languages are, thus, excluded from these public digital services, and as institutions rapidly begin to use AI tools for curriculum, students are inadvertently taught to accept learning about indigenous languages and cultures through a very narrow, often inaccurate, Western framework. As leaders of the nonprofit Te Hiku Media in Aotearoa (New Zealand) assert, “Data is the last frontier of colonization.” To combat AI erasure, the nonprofit has worked to preserve te reo Māori by amassing “310 hours of speech-text pairs from some 200,000 recordings made by roughly 2,500 [members of the Māori community]… an unheard-of level of engagement among researchers in the AI community.” Each one of these recordings functions as an act of protest in the face of AI colonization. The work of Te Hiku Media also presents a model for how big AI tech companies can actually create AI systems that honor and give back to indigenous communities rather than plundering or erasing them.

As AI grows, turning into something taught across school settings, it becomes increasingly important to question this integration. On the day that I sat in the AI workshop during homeroom in November, it felt like Artificial Intelligence was unavoidable–that my only choice was to adapt to it so I could succeed in my academics. At that moment, I understood that this was the very feeling that these big AI companies rely on. If the tool becomes something that society considers inevitable, people will become less likely to question the consequences of it behind the screen.

Learning about the high costs of AI, can change the way that we all think about using it. It is vital to develop the ability to think critically, create independently, and be able to make well-informed choices about AI use on an everyday basis. Making the choice to use AI less, is a decision that lessens the power and profit that AI companies depend on to further their work. We have the choice to opt-out of AI empire-building, and instead, to opt-in on protecting the world.