Human in the Loop

Human in the Loop

The algorithm knows you better than you know yourself. It knows you prefer aisle seats on morning flights. It knows you'll pay extra for hotels with rooftop bars. It knows that when you travel to coastal cities, you always book seafood restaurants for your first night. And increasingly, it knows where you're going before you've consciously decided.

Welcome to the age of AI-driven travel personalisation, where artificial intelligence doesn't just respond to your preferences but anticipates them, curates them, and in some uncomfortable ways, shapes them. As generative AI transforms how we plan and experience travel, we're witnessing an unprecedented convergence of convenience and surveillance that raises fundamental questions about privacy, autonomy, and the serendipitous discoveries that once defined the joy of travel.

The Rise of the AI Travel Companion

The transformation has been swift. According to research from Oliver Wyman, 41% of nearly 2,100 consumers from the United States and Canada reported using generative AI tools for travel inspiration or itinerary planning in March 2024, up from 34% in August 2023. Looking forward, 58% of respondents said they are likely to use the technology again for future trips, with that number jumping to 82% among recent generative AI users.

What makes this shift remarkable isn't just the adoption rate but the depth of personalisation these systems now offer. Google's experimental AI-powered itinerary generator creates bespoke travel plans based on user prompts, offering tailored suggestions for flights, hotels, attractions, and dining. Platforms like Mindtrip, Layla.ai, and Wonderplan have emerged as dedicated AI travel assistants, each promising to understand not just what you want but who you are as a traveller.

These platforms represent a qualitative leap from earlier recommendation engines. Traditional systems relied primarily on collaborative filtering or content-based filtering. Modern AI travel assistants employ large language models capable of understanding nuanced requests like “I want somewhere culturally rich but not touristy, with good vegetarian food and within four hours of London by train.” The system doesn't just match keywords; it comprehends context, interprets preferences, and generates novel recommendations.

The business case is compelling. McKinsey research indicates that companies excelling in personalisation achieve 40% more revenue than their competitors, whilst personalised offers can increase customer satisfaction by approximately 20%. Perhaps most tellingly, 76% of customers report frustration when they don't receive personalised interactions. The message to travel companies is clear: personalise or perish.

Major industry players have responded aggressively. Expedia has integrated more than 350 AI models throughout its marketplace, leveraging what the company calls its most valuable asset: 70 petabytes of traveller information stored on AWS cloud. “Data is our heartbeat,” the company stated, and that heartbeat now pulses through every recommendation, every price adjustment, every nudge towards booking.

Booking Holdings has implemented AI to refine dynamic pricing models, whilst Airbnb employs machine learning to analyse past bookings, browsing behaviour, and individual preferences to retarget customers with personalised marketing campaigns. In a significant development, OpenAI launched third-party integrations within ChatGPT allowing users to research and book trips directly through the chatbot using real-time data from Expedia and Booking.com.

The revolution extends beyond booking platforms. According to McKinsey's 2024 survey of more than 5,000 travellers across China, Germany, the UAE, the UK, and the United States, 43% of travellers used AI to book accommodations, search for leisure activities, and look for local transportation. The technology has moved from novelty to necessity, with travel organisations potentially boosting revenue growth by 15-20% if they fully leverage digital and AI analytics opportunities.

McKinsey found that 66% of travellers surveyed said they are more interested in travel now than before the COVID-19 pandemic, with millennials and Gen Z travellers particularly enthusiastic about AI-assisted planning. These younger cohorts are travelling more and spending a higher share of their income on travel than their older counterparts, making them prime targets for AI personalisation strategies.

Yet beneath this veneer of convenience lies a more complex reality. The same algorithms that promise perfect holidays are built on foundations of extensive data extraction, behavioural prediction, and what some scholars have termed “surveillance capitalism” applied to tourism.

The Data Extraction Machine

To deliver personalisation, AI systems require data. Vast quantities of it. And the travel industry has become particularly adept at collection.

Every interaction leaves a trail. When you search for flights, the system logs your departure flexibility, price sensitivity, and willingness to book. When you browse hotels, it tracks how long you linger on each listing, which photographs you zoom in on, which amenities matter enough to filter for. When you book a restaurant, it notes your cuisine preferences, party size, and typical spending range. When you move through your destination, GPS data maps your routes, dwell times, and unplanned diversions.

Tourism companies are now linking multiple data sources to “complete the customer picture”, which may include family situation, food preferences, travel habits, frequently visited destinations, airline and hotel preferences, loyalty programme participation, and seating choices. According to research on smart tourism systems, this encompasses tourists' demographic information, geographic locations, transaction information, biometric information, and both online and real-life behavioural information.

A single traveller's profile might combine booking history from online travel agencies, click-stream data showing browsing patterns, credit card transaction data revealing spending habits, loyalty programme information, social media activity, mobile app usage patterns, location data from smartphone GPS, biometric data from airport security, and even weather preferences inferred from booking patterns across different climates.

This holistic profiling enables unprecedented predictive capabilities. Systems can forecast not just where you're likely to travel next but when, how much you'll spend, which ancillary services you'll purchase, and how likely you are to abandon your booking at various price points. In the language of surveillance capitalism, these become “behavioural futures” that can be sold to advertisers, insurers, and other third parties seeking to profit from predicted actions.

The regulatory landscape attempts to constrain this extraction. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which entered into full enforcement in 2018, applies to any travel or transportation services provider collecting or processing data about an EU citizen. This includes travel management companies, hotels, airlines, ground transportation services, booking tools, global distribution systems, and companies booking travel for employees.

Under GDPR, as soon as AI involves the use of personal data, the regulation is triggered and applies to such AI processing. The EU framework does not distinguish between private and publicly available data, offering more protection than some other jurisdictions. Implementing privacy by design has become essential, requiring processing as little personal data as possible, keeping it secure, and processing it only where there is a genuine need.

Yet compliance often functions more as a cost of doing business than a genuine limitation. The travel industry has experienced significant data breaches that reveal the vulnerability of collected information. In 2024, Marriott agreed to pay a $52 million settlement in the United States related to the massive Marriott-Starwood breach that affected 383 million guests. The same year, Omni Hotels & Resorts suffered a major cyberattack on 29 March that forced multiple IT systems offline, disrupting reservations, payment processing, and digital room key access.

The MGM Resorts breach in 2023 demonstrated the operational impact beyond data theft, leaving guests stranded in lobbies when digital keys stopped working. When these systems fail, they fail comprehensively.

According to the 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, cybercriminals targeting the hospitality sector most often rely on system intrusions, social engineering, and basic web application attacks, with ransomware featuring in 44% of breaches. The average cost of a hospitality data breach has climbed to $4.03 million in 2025, though this figure captures only direct costs and doesn't account for reputational damage or long-term erosion of customer trust.

These breaches aren't merely technical failures. They represent the materialisation of a fundamental privacy risk inherent in the AI personalisation model: the more data systems collect to improve recommendations, the more valuable and vulnerable that data becomes.

The situation is particularly acute for location data. More than 1,000 apps, including Yelp, Foursquare, Google Maps, Uber, and travel-specific platforms, use location tracking services. When users enable location tracking on their phones or in apps, they allow dozens of data-gathering companies to collect detailed geolocation data, which these companies then sell to advertisers.

One of the most common privacy violations is collecting or tracking a user's location without clearly asking for permission. Many users don't realise the implications of granting “always-on” access or may accidentally agree to permissions without full context. Apps often integrate third-party software development kits for analytics or advertising, and if these third parties access location data, users may unknowingly have their information sold or repurposed, especially in regions where privacy laws are less stringent.

The problem extends beyond commercial exploitation. Many apps use data beyond the initial intended use case, and oftentimes location data ends up with data brokers who aggregate and resell it without meaningful user awareness or consent. Information from GPS and geolocation tags, in combination with other personal information, can be utilised by criminals to identify an individual's present or future location, thus facilitating burglary and theft, stalking, kidnapping, and domestic violence. For public figures, journalists, activists, or anyone with reason to conceal their movements, location tracking represents a genuine security threat.

The introduction of biometric data collection at airports adds another dimension to privacy concerns. As of July 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has deployed facial recognition technology at 32 airports for departing travellers and at all airports for arriving international travellers. The Transportation Security Administration has implemented the technology at 16 airports, including major hubs in Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Miami.

Whilst CBP retains U.S. citizen photos for no more than 12 hours after identity verification, the TSA does retain photos of non-US citizens, allowing surveillance of non-citizens. Privacy advocates worry about function creep: biometric data collected for identity verification could be repurposed for broader surveillance.

Facial recognition technology can be less accurate for people with darker skin tones, women, and older adults, raising equity concerns about who is most likely to be wrongly flagged. Notable flaws include biases that often impact people of colour, women, LGBTQ people, and individuals with physical disabilities. These accuracy disparities mean that marginalised groups bear disproportionate burdens of false positives, additional screening, and the indignity of systems that literally cannot see them correctly.

Perhaps most troublingly, biometric data is irreplaceable. If biometric information such as fingerprints or facial recognition details are compromised, they cannot be reset like a password. Stolen biometric data can be used for identity theft, fraud, or other criminal activities. A private airline could sell biometric information to data brokers, who can then sell it to companies or governments.

SITA estimates that 70% of airlines expect to have biometric ID management in place by 2026, whilst 90% of airports are investing in major programmes or research and development in the area. The trajectory is clear: biometric data collection is becoming infrastructure, not innovation. What begins as optional convenience becomes mandatory procedure.

The Autonomy Paradox

The privacy implications are concerning enough, but AI personalisation raises equally profound questions about autonomy and decision-making. When algorithms shape what options we see, what destinations appear attractive, and what experiences seem worth pursuing, who is really making our travel choices?

Research on AI ethics and consumer protection identifies dark patterns as business practices employing elements of digital choice architecture that subvert or impair consumer autonomy, decision-making, or choice. The combination of AI, personal data, and dark patterns results in an increased ability to manipulate consumers.

AI can escalate dark patterns by leveraging its capabilities to learn from patterns and behaviours, personalising appeals specific to user sensitivities to make manipulative tactics seem less invasive. Dark pattern techniques undermine consumer autonomy, leading to financial losses, privacy violations, and reduced trust in digital platforms.

The widespread use of personalised algorithmic decision-making has raised ethical concerns about its impact on user autonomy. Digital platforms can use personalised algorithms to manipulate user choices for economic gain by exploiting cognitive biases, nudging users towards actions that align more with platform owners' interests than users' long-term well-being.

Consider dynamic pricing, a ubiquitous practice in travel booking. Airlines and hotels adjust prices based on demand, but AI-enhanced systems now factor in individual user data: your browsing history, your previous booking patterns, even the device you're using. If the algorithm determines you're price-insensitive or likely to book regardless of cost, you may see higher prices than another user searching for the same flight or room.

This practice, sometimes called “personalised pricing” or more critically “price discrimination”, raises questions about fairness and informed consent. Users rarely know they're seeing prices tailored to extract maximum revenue from their specific profile. The opacity of algorithmic pricing means travellers cannot easily determine whether they're receiving genuine deals or being exploited based on predicted willingness to pay.

The asymmetry of information is stark. The platform knows your entire booking history, your browsing behaviour, your price sensitivity thresholds, your typical response to scarcity messages, and your likelihood of abandoning a booking at various price points. You know none of this about the platform's strategy. This informational imbalance fundamentally distorts what economists call “perfect competition” and transforms booking into a game where only one player can see the board.

According to research, 65% of people see targeted promotions as a top reason to make a purchase, suggesting these tactics effectively influence behaviour. Scarcity messaging offers a particularly revealing example. “Three people are looking at this property” or “Price increased £20 since you last viewed” creates urgency that may or may not reflect reality. When these messages are personalised based on your susceptibility to urgency tactics, they cross from information provision into manipulation.

The possibility of behavioural manipulation calls for policies that ensure human autonomy and self-determination in any interaction between humans and AI systems. Yet regulatory frameworks struggle to keep pace with technological sophistication.

The European Union has attempted to address these concerns through the AI Act, which was published in the Official Journal on 12 July 2024 and entered into force on 1 August 2024. The Act introduces a risk-based regulatory framework for AI, mandating obligations for developers and providers according to the level of risk associated with each AI system.

Whilst the tourism industry is not explicitly called out as high-risk, the use of AI systems for tasks such as personalised travel recommendations based on behaviour analysis, sentiment analysis in social media, or facial recognition for security will likely be classified as high-risk. For use of prohibited AI systems, fines may be up to 7% of worldwide annual turnover, whilst noncompliance with requirements for high-risk AI systems will be subject to fines of up to 3% of turnover.

However, use of smart travel assistants, personalised incentives for loyalty scheme members, and solutions to mitigate disruptions will all be classified as low or limited risk under the EU AI Act. Companies using AI in these ways will have to adhere to transparency standards, but face less stringent regulation.

Transparency itself has become a watchword in discussions of AI ethics. The call is for transparent, explainable AI where users can comprehend how decisions affecting their travel are made. Tourists should know how their data is being collected and used, and AI systems should be designed to mitigate bias and make fair decisions.

Yet transparency alone may not suffice. Even when privacy policies disclose data practices, they're typically lengthy, technical documents that few users read or fully understand. According to an Apex report, a significant two-thirds of consumers worry about their data being misused. However, 62% of consumers might share more personal data if there's a discernible advantage, like tailored offers.

But is this exchange truly voluntary when the alternative is a degraded user experience or being excluded from the most convenient booking platforms? When 71% of consumers expect personalised experiences and 76% feel frustrated without them, according to McKinsey research, has personalisation become less a choice and more a condition of participation in modern travel?

The question of voluntariness deserves scrutiny. Consent frameworks assume roughly equal bargaining power and genuine alternatives. But when a handful of platforms dominate travel booking, when personalisation becomes the default and opting out requires technical sophistication most users lack, when privacy-protective alternatives don't exist or charge premium prices, can we meaningfully say users “choose” surveillance?

The Death of Serendipity

Beyond privacy and autonomy lies perhaps the most culturally significant impact of AI personalisation: the potential death of serendipity, the loss of unexpected discovery that has historically been central to the transformative power of travel.

Recommender systems often suffer from feedback loop phenomena, leading to the filter bubble effect that reinforces homogeneous content and reduces user satisfaction. Over-relying on AI for destination recommendations can create a situation where suggestions become too focused on past preferences, limiting exposure to new and unexpected experiences.

The algorithm optimises for predicted satisfaction based on historical data. If you've previously enjoyed beach holidays, it will recommend more beach holidays. If you favour Italian cuisine, it will surface Italian restaurants. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle where your preferences become narrower and more defined with each interaction.

But travel has traditionally been valuable precisely because it disrupts our patterns. The wrong turn that leads to a hidden plaza. The restaurant recommended by a stranger that becomes a highlight of your trip. The museum you only visited because it was raining and you needed shelter. These moments of serendipity cannot be algorithmically predicted because they emerge from chance, context, and openness to the unplanned.

Research on algorithmic serendipity explores whether AI-driven systems can introduce unexpected yet relevant content, breaking predictable patterns to encourage exploration and discovery. Large language models have shown potential in serendipity prediction due to their extensive world knowledge and reasoning capabilities.

A framework called SERAL was developed to address this challenge, and online experiments demonstrate improvements in exposure, clicks, and transactions of serendipitous items. It has been fully deployed in the “Guess What You Like” section of the Taobao App homepage. Context-aware algorithms factor in location, preferences, and even social dynamics to craft itineraries that are both personalised and serendipitous.

Yet there's something paradoxical about algorithmic serendipity. True serendipity isn't engineered or predicted; it's the absence of prediction. When an algorithm determines that you would enjoy something unexpected and then serves you that unexpected thing, it's no longer unexpected. It's been calculated, predicted, and delivered. The serendipity has been optimised out in the very act of trying to optimise it in.

Companies need to find a balance between targeted optimisation and explorative openness to the unexpected. Algorithms that only deliver personalised content can prevent new ideas from emerging, and companies must ensure that AI also offers alternative perspectives.

The filter bubble effect has broader cultural implications. If millions of travellers are all being guided by algorithms trained on similar data sets, we may see a homogenisation of travel experiences. The same “hidden gems” recommended to everyone. The same Instagram-worthy locations appearing in everyone's feeds. The same optimised itineraries walking the same optimised routes.

Consider what happens when an algorithm identifies an underappreciated restaurant or viewpoint and begins recommending it widely. Within months, it's overwhelmed with visitors, loses the character that made it special, and ultimately becomes exactly the sort of tourist trap the algorithm was meant to help users avoid. Algorithmic discovery at scale creates its own destruction.

This represents not just an individual loss but a collective one: the gradual narrowing of what's experienced, what's valued, and ultimately what's preserved and maintained in tourist destinations. If certain sites and experiences are never surfaced by algorithms, they may cease to be economically viable, leading to a feedback loop where algorithmic recommendation shapes not just what we see but what survives to be seen.

Local businesses that don't optimise for algorithmic visibility, that don't accumulate reviews on the platforms that feed AI recommendations, simply vanish from the digital map. They may continue to serve local communities, but to the algorithmically-guided traveller, they effectively don't exist. This creates evolutionary pressure for businesses to optimise for algorithm-friendliness rather than quality, authenticity, or innovation.

Towards a More Balanced Future

The trajectory of AI personalisation in travel is not predetermined. Technical, regulatory, and cultural interventions could shape a future that preserves the benefits whilst mitigating the harms.

Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) offer one promising avenue. PETs include technologies like differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, federated learning, and zero-knowledge proofs, designed to protect personal data whilst enabling valuable data use. Federated learning, in particular, allows parties to share insights from analysis on individual data sets without sharing data itself. This decentralised approach to machine learning trains AI models with data accessed on the user's device, potentially offering personalisation without centralised surveillance.

Whilst adoption in the travel industry remains limited, PETs have been successfully implemented in healthcare, finance, insurance, telecommunications, and law enforcement. Technologies like encryption and federated learning ensure that sensitive information remains protected even during international exchanges.

The promise of federated learning for travel is significant. Your travel preferences, booking patterns, and behavioural data could remain on your device, encrypted and under your control. AI models could be trained on aggregate patterns without any individual's data ever being centralised or exposed. Personalisation would emerge from local processing rather than surveillance. The technology exists. What's lacking is commercial incentive to implement it and regulatory pressure to require it.

Data minimisation represents another practical approach: collecting only the minimum amount of data necessary from users. When tour operators limit the data collected from customers, they reduce risk and potential exposure points. Beyond securing data, businesses must be transparent with customers about its use.

Some companies are beginning to recognise the value proposition of privacy. According to the Apex report, whilst 66% of consumers worry about data misuse, 62% might share more personal data if there's a discernible advantage. This suggests an opportunity for travel companies to differentiate themselves through stronger privacy protections, offering travellers the choice between convenience with surveillance or slightly less personalisation with greater privacy.

Regulatory pressure is intensifying. The EU AI Act's risk-based framework requires companies to conduct risk assessments and conformity assessments before using high-risk systems and to ensure there is a “human in the loop”. This mandates that consequential decisions cannot be fully automated but must involve human oversight and the possibility of human intervention.

The European Data Protection Board has issued guidance on facial recognition at airports, finding that the only storage solutions compatible with privacy requirements are those where biometric data is stored in the hands of the individual or in a central database with the encryption key solely in their possession. This points towards user-controlled data architectures that return agency to travellers.

Some advocates argue for a right to “analogue alternatives”, ensuring that those who opt out of AI-driven systems aren't excluded from services or charged premium prices for privacy. Just as passengers can opt out of facial recognition at airport security and instead go through standard identity verification, travellers should be able to access non-personalised booking experiences without penalty.

Addressing the filter bubble requires both technical and interface design interventions. Recommendation systems could include “exploration modes” that deliberately surface options outside a user's typical preferences. They could make filter bubble effects visible, showing users how their browsing history influences recommendations and offering easy ways to reset or diversify their algorithmic profile.

More fundamentally, travel platforms could reconsider optimisation metrics. Rather than purely optimising for predicted satisfaction or booking conversion, systems could incorporate diversity, novelty, and serendipity as explicit goals. This requires accepting that the “best” recommendation isn't always the one most likely to match past preferences.

Platforms could implement “algorithmic sabbaticals”, periodically resetting recommendation profiles to inject fresh perspectives. They could create “surprise me” features that deliberately ignore your history and suggest something completely different. They could show users the roads not taken, making visible the destinations and experiences filtered out by personalisation algorithms.

Cultural shifts matter as well. Travellers can resist algorithmic curation by deliberately seeking out resources that don't rely on personalisation: physical guidebooks, local advice, random exploration. They can regularly audit and reset their digital profiles, use privacy-focused browsers and VPNs, and opt out of location tracking when it's not essential.

Travel industry professionals can advocate for ethical AI practices within their organisations, pushing back against dark patterns and manipulative design. They can educate travellers about data practices and offer genuine choices about privacy. They can prioritise long-term trust over short-term optimisation.

More than 50% of travel agencies used generative AI in 2024 to help customers with the booking process, yet less than 15% of travel agencies and tour operators currently use AI tools, indicating significant room for growth and evolution in how these technologies are deployed. This adoption phase represents an opportunity to shape norms and practices before they become entrenched.

The Choice Before Us

We stand at an inflection point in travel technology. The AI personalisation systems being built today will shape travel experiences for decades to come. The data architecture, privacy practices, and algorithmic approaches being implemented now will be difficult to undo once they become infrastructure.

The fundamental tension is between optimisation and openness, between the algorithm that knows exactly what you want and the possibility that you don't yet know what you want yourself. Between the curated experience that maximises predicted satisfaction and the unstructured exploration that creates space for transformation.

This isn't a Luddite rejection of technology. AI personalisation offers genuine benefits: reduced decision fatigue, discovery of options matching niche preferences, accessibility improvements for travellers with disabilities or language barriers, and efficiency gains that make travel more affordable and accessible.

For travellers with mobility limitations, AI systems that automatically filter for wheelchair-accessible hotels and attractions provide genuine liberation. For those with dietary restrictions or allergies, personalisation that surfaces safe dining options offers peace of mind. For language learners, systems that match proficiency levels to destination difficulty facilitate growth. These are not trivial conveniences but meaningful enhancements to the travel experience.

But these benefits need not come at the cost of privacy, autonomy, and serendipity. Technical alternatives exist. Regulatory frameworks are emerging. Consumer awareness is growing.

What's required is intentionality: a collective decision about what kind of travel future we want to build. Do we want a world where every journey is optimised, predicted, and curated, where the algorithm decides what experiences are worth having? Or do we want to preserve space for privacy, for genuine choice, for unexpected discovery?

The sixty-six percent of travellers who reported being more interested in travel now than before the pandemic, according to McKinsey's 2024 survey, represent an enormous economic force. If these travellers demand better privacy protections, genuine transparency, and algorithmic systems designed for exploration rather than exploitation, the industry will respond.

Consumer power remains underutilised in this equation. Individual travellers often feel powerless against platform policies and opaque algorithms, but collectively they represent the revenue stream that sustains the entire industry. Coordinated demand for privacy-protective alternatives, willingness to pay premium prices for surveillance-free services, and vocal resistance to manipulative practices could shift commercial incentives.

Travel has always occupied a unique place in human culture. It's been seen as transformative, educational, consciousness-expanding. The grand tour, the gap year, the pilgrimage, the journey of self-discovery: these archetypes emphasise travel's potential to change us, to expose us to difference, to challenge our assumptions.

Algorithmic personalisation, taken to its logical extreme, threatens this transformative potential. If we only see what algorithms predict we'll like based on what we've liked before, we remain imprisoned in our past preferences. We encounter not difference but refinement of sameness. The algorithm becomes not a window to new experiences but a mirror reflecting our existing biases back to us with increasing precision.

The algorithm may know where you'll go next. But perhaps the more important question is: do you want it to? And if not, what are you willing to do about it?

The answer lies not in rejection but in intentional adoption. Use AI tools, but understand their limitations. Accept personalisation, but demand transparency about its mechanisms. Enjoy curated recommendations, but deliberately seek out the uncurated. Let algorithms reduce friction and surface options, but make the consequential choices yourself.

Travel technology should serve human flourishing, not corporate surveillance. It should expand possibility rather than narrow it. It should enable discovery rather than dictate it. Achieving this requires vigilance from travellers, responsibility from companies, and effective regulation from governments. The age of AI travel personalisation has arrived. The question is whether we'll shape it to human values or allow it to shape us.


Sources and References

European Data Protection Board. (2024). “Facial recognition at airports: individuals should have maximum control over biometric data.” https://www.edpb.europa.eu/

Fortune. (2024, January 25). “Travel companies are using AI to better customize trip itineraries.” Fortune Magazine.

McKinsey & Company. (2024). “The promise of travel in the age of AI.” McKinsey & Company.

McKinsey & Company. (2024). “Remapping travel with agentic AI.” McKinsey & Company.

McKinsey & Company. (2024). “The State of Travel and Hospitality 2024.” Survey of more than 5,000 travellers across China, Germany, UAE, UK, and United States.

Nature. (2024). “Inevitable challenges of autonomy: ethical concerns in personalized algorithmic decision-making.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

Oliver Wyman. (2024, May). “This Is How Generative AI Is Making Travel Planning Easier.” Oliver Wyman.

Transportation Security Administration. (2024). “TSA PreCheck® Touchless ID: Evaluating Facial Identification Technology.” U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Travel And Tour World. (2024). “Europe's AI act sets global benchmark for travel and tourism.” Travel And Tour World.

Travel And Tour World. (2024). “How Data Breaches Are Shaping the Future of Travel Security.” Travel And Tour World.

U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2022). “Facial Recognition Technology: CBP Traveler Identity Verification and Efforts to Address Privacy Issues.” Report GAO-22-106154.

Verizon. (2025). “2025 Data Breach Investigations Report.” Verizon Business.


Tim Green

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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When Amazon's Alexa first started listening to our commands in 2014, it seemed like magic. Ask about the weather, dim the lights, play your favourite song, all through simple voice commands. Yet beneath its conversational surface lay something decidedly unmagical: a tightly integrated system where every component, from speech recognition to natural language understanding, existed as part of one massive, inseparable whole. This monolithic approach mirrored the software architecture that dominated technology for decades. Build everything under one roof, integrate it tightly, ship it as a single unit.

Fast forward to today, and something fundamental is shifting. The same architectural revolution that transformed software development over the past fifteen years (microservices breaking down monolithic applications into independent, specialised services) is now reshaping how we build artificial intelligence. The question isn't whether AI will follow this path, but how quickly the transformation will occur and what it means for the future of machine intelligence.

The cloud microservice market is projected to reach $13.20 billion by 2034, with a compound annual growth rate of 21.20 per cent from 2024 to 2034. But the real story lies in the fundamental rethinking of how intelligence itself should be architected, deployed, and scaled. AI is experiencing its own architectural awakening, one that promises to make machine intelligence more flexible, efficient, and powerful than ever before.

The Monolithic Trap

The dominant paradigm in AI development has been delightfully simple: bigger is better. Bigger models, more parameters, vaster datasets. GPT-3 arrived in 2020 with 175 billion parameters, trained on hundreds of billions of words, and the implicit assumption was clear. Intelligence emerges from scale. Making models larger would inevitably make them smarter.

This approach has yielded remarkable results. Large language models can write poetry, code software, and engage in surprisingly nuanced conversations. Yet the monolithic approach faces mounting challenges that scale alone cannot solve.

Consider the sheer physics of the problem. A 13 billion parameter model at 16-bit precision demands over 24 gigabytes of GPU memory just to load parameters, with additional memory needed for activations during inference, often exceeding 36 gigabytes total. This necessitates expensive high-end GPUs that put cutting-edge AI beyond the reach of many organisations. When OpenAI discovered a mistake in GPT-3's implementation, they didn't fix it. The computational cost of retraining made it economically infeasible. Think about that: an error so expensive to correct that one of the world's leading AI companies simply learned to live with it.

The scalability issues extend beyond hardware. As model size increases, improvements in performance tend to slow down, suggesting that doubling the model size may not double the performance gain. We're hitting diminishing returns. Moreover, if training continues to scale indefinitely, we will quickly reach the point where there isn't enough existing data to support further learning. High-quality English language data could potentially be exhausted as soon as this year, with low-quality data following as early as 2030. We're running out of internet to feed these hungry models.

Then there's the talent problem. Training and deploying large language models demands a profound grasp of deep learning workflows, transformers, distributed software, and hardware. Finding specialised talent is a challenge, with demand far outstripping supply. Everyone wants to hire ML engineers; nobody can find enough of them.

Perhaps most troubling, scaling doesn't resolve fundamental problems like model bias and toxicity, which often creep in from the training data itself. Making a biased model bigger simply amplifies its biases. It's like turning up the volume on a song that's already off-key.

These limitations represent a fundamental constraint on the monolithic approach. Just as software engineering discovered that building ever-larger monolithic applications created insurmountable maintenance and scaling challenges, AI is bumping against the ceiling of what single, massive models can achieve.

Learning from Software's Journey

The software industry has been here before, and the parallel is uncanny. For decades, applications were built as monoliths: single, tightly integrated codebases where every feature lived under one roof. Need to add a new feature? Modify the monolith. Need to scale? Scale the entire application, even if only one component needed more resources. Need to update a single function? Redeploy everything and hold your breath.

This approach worked when applications were simpler and teams smaller. But as software grew complex and organisations scaled, cracks appeared. A bug in one module could crash the entire system. Different teams couldn't work independently without stepping on each other's digital toes. The monolith became a bottleneck to innovation, a giant bureaucratic blob that said “no” more often than “yes.”

The microservices revolution changed everything. Instead of one massive application, systems were decomposed into smaller, independent services, each handling a specific business capability. These services communicate through well-defined APIs, can be developed and deployed independently, and scale based on individual needs rather than system-wide constraints. It's the difference between a Swiss Army knife and a fully equipped workshop. Both have their place, but the workshop gives you far more flexibility.

According to a survey by Solo.io, 85 per cent of modern enterprise companies now manage complex applications with microservices. The pattern has become so prevalent that software architecture without it seems almost quaint, like insisting on using a flip phone in 2025.

Yet microservices aren't merely a technical pattern. They represent a philosophical shift: instead of pursuing comprehensiveness in a single entity, microservices embrace specialisation, modularity, and composition. Each service does one thing well, and the system's power emerges from how these specialised components work together. It's less “jack of all trades, master of none” and more “master of one, orchestrated beautifully.”

This philosophy is now migrating to AI, with profound implications.

The Rise of Modular Intelligence

While the software world was discovering microservices, AI research was quietly developing its own version: Mixture of Experts (MoE). Instead of a single neural network processing all inputs, an MoE system consists of multiple specialised sub-networks (the “experts”), each trained to handle specific types of data or tasks. A gating network decides which experts to activate for any given input, routing data to the most appropriate specialists.

The architectural pattern emerged from a simple insight: not all parts of a model need to be active for every task. Just as you wouldn't use the same mental processes to solve a maths problem as you would to recognise a face, AI systems shouldn't activate their entire parameter space for every query. Specialisation and selective activation achieve better results with less computation. It's intelligent laziness at its finest.

MoE architectures enable large-scale models to greatly reduce computation costs during pre-training and achieve faster performance during inference. By activating only the specific experts needed for a given task, MoE systems deliver efficiency without sacrificing capability. You get the power of a massive model with the efficiency of a much smaller one.

Mistral AI's Mixtral 8x7B, released in December 2023 under an Apache 2.0 licence, exemplifies this approach beautifully. The model contains 46.7 billion parameters distributed across eight experts, but achieves high performance by activating only a subset for each input. This selective activation means the model punches well above its weight, matching or exceeding much larger monolithic models whilst using significantly less compute. It's the AI equivalent of a hybrid car: full power when you need it, maximum efficiency when you don't.

While OpenAI has never officially confirmed GPT-4's architecture (and likely never will), persistent rumours within the AI community suggest it employs an MoE approach. Though OpenAI explicitly stated in their GPT-4 technical report that they would not disclose architectural details due to competitive and safety considerations, behavioural analysis and performance characteristics have fuelled widespread speculation about its modular nature. The whispers in the AI research community are loud enough to be taken seriously.

Whether or not GPT-4 uses MoE, the pattern is gaining momentum. Meta's continued investment in modular architectures, Google's integration of MoE into their models, and the proliferation of open-source implementations all point to a future where monolithic AI becomes the exception rather than the rule.

Agents and Orchestration

The microservice analogy extends beyond model architecture to how AI systems are deployed. Enter AI agents: autonomous software components capable of setting goals, planning actions, and interacting with ecosystems without constant human intervention. Think of them as microservices with ambition.

If microservices gave software modularity and scalability, AI agents add autonomous intelligence and learning capabilities to that foundation. The crucial difference is that whilst microservices execute predefined processes (do exactly what I programmed you to do), AI agents dynamically decide how to fulfil requests using language models to determine optimal steps (figure out the best way to accomplish this goal).

This distinction matters enormously. A traditional microservice might handle payment processing by executing a predetermined workflow: validate card, check funds, process transaction, send confirmation. An AI agent handling the same task could assess context, identify potential fraud patterns, suggest alternative payment methods based on user history, and adapt its approach based on real-time conditions. The agent doesn't just execute; it reasons, adapts, and learns.

The MicroAgent pattern, explored by Microsoft's Semantic Kernel team, takes this concept further by partitioning functionality by domain and utilising agent composition. Each microagent associates with a specific service, with instructions tailored for that service. This creates a hierarchy of specialisation: lower-level agents handle specific tasks whilst higher-level orchestrators coordinate activities. It's like a company org chart, but for AI.

Consider how this transforms enterprise AI deployment. Instead of a single massive model attempting to handle everything from customer service to data analysis, organisations deploy specialised agents: one for natural language queries, another for database access, a third for business logic, and an orchestrator to coordinate them. Each agent can be updated, scaled, or replaced independently. When a breakthrough happens in natural language processing, you swap out that one agent. You don't retrain your entire system.

Multi-agent architectures are becoming the preferred approach as organisations grow, enabling greater scale, control, and flexibility compared to monolithic systems. Key benefits include increased performance through complexity breakdown with specialised agents, modularity and extensibility for easier testing and modification, and resilience with better fault tolerance. If one agent fails, the others keep working. Your system limps rather than collapses.

The hierarchical task decomposition pattern proves particularly powerful for complex problems. A root agent receives an ambiguous task and decomposes it into smaller, manageable sub-tasks, delegating each to specialised sub-agents at lower levels. This process repeats through multiple layers until tasks become simple enough for worker agents to execute directly, producing more comprehensive outcomes than simpler, flat architectures achieve. It's delegation all the way down.

The Composable AI Stack

Whilst MoE models and agent architectures demonstrate microservice principles within AI systems, a parallel development is reshaping how AI integrates with enterprise software: the rise of compound AI systems.

The insight is disarmingly simple: large language models alone are often insufficient for complex, real-world tasks requiring specific constraints like latency, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness. Instead, cutting-edge AI systems combine LLMs with other components (databases, retrieval systems, specialised models, and traditional software) to create sophisticated applications that perform reliably in production. It's the Lego approach to AI: snap together the right pieces for the job at hand.

This is the AI equivalent of microservices composition, where you build powerful systems not by making individual components infinitely large, but by combining specialised components thoughtfully. The modern AI stack, which stabilised in 2024, reflects this understanding. Smart companies stopped asking “how big should our model be?” and started asking “which components do we actually need?”

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) exemplifies this composability perfectly. Rather than encoding all knowledge within a model's parameters (a fool's errand at scale), RAG systems combine a language model with a retrieval system. When you ask a question, the system first retrieves relevant documents from a knowledge base, then feeds both your question and the retrieved context to the language model. This separation of concerns mirrors microservice principles: specialised components handling specific tasks, coordinated through well-defined interfaces. The model doesn't need to know everything; it just needs to know where to look.

RAG adoption has skyrocketed, dominating at 51 per cent adoption in 2024, a dramatic rise from 31 per cent the previous year. This surge reflects a broader shift from monolithic, all-in-one AI solutions towards composed systems that integrate specialised capabilities. The numbers tell the story: enterprises are voting with their infrastructure budgets.

The composability principle extends to model selection itself. Rather than deploying a single large model for all tasks, organisations increasingly adopt a portfolio approach: smaller, specialised models for specific use cases, with larger models reserved for tasks genuinely requiring their capabilities. This mirrors how microservice architectures deploy lightweight services for simple tasks whilst reserving heavyweight services for complex operations. Why use a sledgehammer when a tack hammer will do?

Gartner's 2024 predictions emphasise this trend emphatically: “At every level of the business technology stack, composable modularity has emerged as the foundational architecture for continuous access to adaptive change.” The firm predicted that by 2024, 70 per cent of large and medium-sized organisations would include composability in their approval criteria for new application plans. Composability isn't a nice-to-have anymore. It's table stakes.

The MASAI framework (Modular Architecture for Software-engineering AI Agents), introduced in 2024, explicitly embeds architectural constraints showing a 40 per cent improvement in successful AI-generated fixes when incorporated into the design. This demonstrates that modularity isn't merely an operational convenience; it fundamentally improves AI system performance. The architecture isn't just cleaner. It's demonstrably better.

Real-World Divergence

The contrast between monolithic and modular AI approaches becomes vivid when examining how major technology companies architect their systems. Amazon's Alexa represents a more monolithic architecture, with components built and tightly integrated in-house. Apple's integration with OpenAI for enhanced Siri capabilities, by contrast, exemplifies a modular approach rather than monolithic in-house development. Same problem, radically different philosophies.

These divergent strategies illuminate the trade-offs beautifully. Monolithic architectures offer greater control and tighter integration. When you build everything in-house, you control the entire stack, optimise for specific use cases, and avoid dependencies on external providers. Amazon's approach with Alexa allows them to fine-tune every aspect of the experience, from wake word detection to response generation. It's their baby, and they control every aspect of its upbringing.

Yet this control comes at a cost. Monolithic systems can hinder rapid innovation. The risk that changes in one component will affect the entire system limits the ability to easily leverage external AI capabilities. When a breakthrough happens in natural language processing, a monolithic system must either replicate that innovation in-house (expensive, time-consuming) or undertake risky system-wide integration (potentially breaking everything). Neither option is particularly appealing.

Apple's partnership with OpenAI represents a different philosophy entirely. Rather than building everything internally, Apple recognises that specialised AI capabilities can be integrated as modular components. This allows them to leverage cutting-edge language models without building that expertise in-house, whilst maintaining their core competencies in hardware, user experience, and privacy. Play to your strengths, outsource the rest.

The modular approach increasingly dominates enterprise deployment. Multi-agent architectures, where specialised agents handle specific functions, have become the preferred approach for organisations requiring scale, control, and flexibility. This pattern allows enterprises to mix and match capabilities, swapping components as technology evolves without wholesale system replacement. It's future-proofing through modularity.

Consider the practical implications for an enterprise deploying customer service AI. The monolithic approach would build or buy a single large model trained on customer service interactions, attempting to handle everything from simple FAQs to complex troubleshooting. One model to rule them all. The modular approach might deploy separate components: a routing agent to classify queries, a retrieval system for documentation, a reasoning agent for complex problems, and specialised models for different product lines. Each component can be optimised, updated, or replaced independently, and the system gracefully degrades if one component fails rather than collapsing entirely. Resilience through redundancy.

The Technical Foundations

The shift to microservice AI architectures rests on several technical enablers that make modular, distributed AI systems practical at scale. The infrastructure matters as much as the algorithms.

Containerisation and orchestration, the backbone of microservice deployment in software, are proving equally crucial for AI. Kubernetes, the dominant container orchestration platform, allows AI models and agents to be packaged as containers, deployed across distributed infrastructure, and scaled dynamically based on demand. When AI agents are deployed within a containerised microservices framework, they transform a static system into a dynamic, adaptive one. The containers provide the packaging; Kubernetes provides the logistics.

Service mesh technologies like Istio and Linkerd, which bundle features such as load balancing, encryption, and monitoring by default, are being adapted for AI deployments. These tools solve the challenging problems of service-to-service communication, observability, and reliability that emerge when you decompose a system into many distributed components. It's plumbing, but critical plumbing.

Edge computing is experiencing growth in 2024 due to its ability to lower latency and manage real-time data processing. For AI systems, edge deployment allows specialised models to run close to where data is generated, reducing latency and bandwidth requirements. A modular AI architecture can distribute different agents across edge and cloud infrastructure based on latency requirements, data sensitivity, and computational needs. Process sensitive data locally, heavy lifting in the cloud.

API-first design, a cornerstone of microservice architecture, is equally vital for modular AI. Well-defined APIs allow AI components to communicate without tight coupling. A language model exposed through an API can be swapped for a better model without changing downstream consumers. Retrieval systems, reasoning engines, and specialised tools can be integrated through standardised interfaces, enabling the composition that makes compound AI systems powerful. The interface is the contract.

MACH architecture (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless) has become one of the most discussed trends in 2024 due to its modularity. This architectural style, whilst originally applied to commerce and content systems, provides a blueprint for building composable AI systems that can evolve rapidly. The acronym is catchy; the implications are profound.

The integration of DevOps practices into AI development (sometimes called MLOps or AIOps) fosters seamless integration between development and operations teams. This becomes essential when managing dozens of specialised AI models and agents rather than a single monolithic system. Automated testing, continuous integration, and deployment pipelines allow modular AI components to be updated safely and frequently. Deploy fast, break nothing.

The Efficiency Paradox

One of the most compelling arguments for modular AI architectures is efficiency, though the relationship is more nuanced than it first appears. On the surface, it seems counterintuitive.

At face value, decomposing a system into multiple components seems wasteful. Instead of one model, you maintain many. Instead of one deployment, you coordinate several. The overhead of inter-component communication and orchestration adds complexity that a monolithic system avoids. More moving parts, more things to break.

Yet in practice, modularity often proves more efficient precisely because of its selectivity. A monolithic model must be large enough to handle every possible task it might encounter, carrying billions of parameters even for simple queries. A modular system can route simple queries to lightweight models and reserve heavy computation for genuinely complex tasks. It's the difference between driving a lorry to the corner shop and taking a bicycle.

MoE models embody this principle elegantly. Mixtral 8x7B contains 46.7 billion parameters, but activates only a subset for any given input, achieving efficiency that belies its size. This selective activation means the model uses significantly less compute per inference than a dense model of comparable capability. Same power, less electricity.

The same logic applies to agent architectures. Rather than a single agent with all capabilities always loaded, a modular system activates only the agents needed for a specific task. Processing a simple FAQ doesn't require spinning up your reasoning engine, database query system, and multimodal analysis tools. Efficiency comes from doing less, not more. The best work is the work you don't do.

Hardware utilisation improves as well. In a monolithic system, the entire model must fit on available hardware, often requiring expensive high-end GPUs even for simple deployments. Modular systems can distribute components across heterogeneous infrastructure: powerful GPUs for complex reasoning, cheaper CPUs for simple routing, edge devices for latency-sensitive tasks. Resource allocation becomes granular rather than all-or-nothing. Right tool, right job, right place.

The efficiency gains extend to training and updating. Monolithic models require complete retraining to incorporate new capabilities or fix errors, a process so expensive that OpenAI chose not to fix known mistakes in GPT-3. Modular systems allow targeted updates: improve one component without touching others, add new capabilities by deploying new agents, and refine specialised models based on specific performance data. Surgical strikes versus carpet bombing.

Yet the efficiency paradox remains real for small-scale deployments. The overhead of orchestration, inter-component communication, and maintaining multiple models can outweigh the benefits when serving low volumes or simple use cases. Like microservices in software, modular AI architectures shine at scale but can be overkill for simpler scenarios. Sometimes a monolith is exactly what you need.

Challenges and Complexity

The benefits of microservice AI architectures come with significant challenges that organisations must navigate carefully. Just as the software industry learned that microservices introduce new forms of complexity even as they solve monolithic problems, AI is discovering similar trade-offs. There's no free lunch.

Orchestration complexity tops the list. Coordinating multiple AI agents or models requires sophisticated infrastructure. When a user query involves five different specialised agents, something must route the request, coordinate the agents, handle failures gracefully, and synthesise results into a coherent response. This orchestration layer becomes a critical component that itself must be reliable, performant, and maintainable. Who orchestrates the orchestrators?

The hierarchical task decomposition pattern, whilst powerful, introduces latency. Each layer of decomposition adds a round trip, and tasks that traverse multiple levels accumulate delay. For latency-sensitive applications, this overhead can outweigh the benefits of specialisation. Sometimes faster beats better.

Debugging and observability grow harder when functionality spans multiple components. In a monolithic system, tracing a problem is straightforward: the entire execution happens in one place. In a modular system, a single user interaction might touch a dozen components, each potentially contributing to the final outcome. When something goes wrong, identifying the culprit requires sophisticated distributed tracing and logging infrastructure. Finding the needle gets harder when you have more haystacks.

Version management becomes thornier. When your AI system comprises twenty different models and agents, each evolving independently, ensuring compatibility becomes non-trivial. Microservices in software addressed these questions through API contracts and integration testing, but AI components are less deterministic, making such guarantees harder. Your language model might return slightly different results today than yesterday. Good luck writing unit tests for that.

The talent and expertise required multiplies. Building and maintaining a modular AI system demands not just ML expertise, but also skills in distributed systems, DevOps, orchestration, and system design. The scarcity of specialised talent means finding people who can design and operate complex AI architectures is particularly challenging. You need Renaissance engineers, and they're in short supply.

Perhaps most subtly, modular AI systems introduce emergent behaviours that are harder to predict and control. When multiple AI agents interact, especially with learning capabilities, the system's behaviour emerges from their interactions. This can produce powerful adaptability, but also unexpected failures or behaviours that are difficult to debug or prevent. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts, for better or worse.

The Future of Intelligence Design

Despite these challenges, the trajectory is clear. The same forces that drove software towards microservices are propelling AI in the same direction: the need for adaptability, efficiency, and scale in increasingly complex systems. History doesn't repeat, but it certainly rhymes.

The pattern is already evident everywhere you look. Multi-agent architectures have become the preferred approach for enterprises requiring scale and flexibility. The 2024 surge in RAG adoption reflects organisations choosing composition over monoliths. The proliferation of MoE models and the frameworks emerging to support modular AI development all point towards a future where monolithic AI is the exception rather than the rule. The writing is on the wall, written in modular architecture patterns.

What might this future look like in practice? Imagine an AI system for healthcare diagnosis. Rather than a single massive model attempting to handle everything, you might have a constellation of specialised components working in concert. One agent handles patient interaction and symptom gathering, trained specifically on medical dialogues. Another specialises in analysing medical images, trained on vast datasets of radiology scans. A third draws on the latest research literature through retrieval-augmented generation, accessing PubMed and clinical trials databases. A reasoning agent integrates these inputs, considering patient history, current symptoms, and medical evidence to suggest potential diagnoses. An orchestrator coordinates these agents, manages conversational flow, and ensures appropriate specialists are consulted. Each component does its job brilliantly; together they're transformative.

Each component can be developed, validated, and updated independently. When new medical research emerges, the retrieval system incorporates it without retraining other components. When imaging analysis improves, that specialised model upgrades without touching patient interaction or reasoning systems. The system gracefully degrades: if one component fails, others continue functioning. You get reliability through redundancy, a core principle of resilient system design.

The financial services sector is already moving this direction. JPMorgan Chase and other institutions are deploying AI systems that combine specialised models for fraud detection, customer service, market analysis, and regulatory compliance, orchestrated into coherent applications. These aren't monolithic systems but composed architectures where specialised components handle specific functions. Money talks, and it's saying “modular.”

Education presents another compelling use case. A modular AI tutoring system might combine a natural language interaction agent, a pedagogical reasoning system that adapts to student learning styles, a content retrieval system accessing educational materials, and assessment agents that evaluate understanding. Each component specialises, and the system composes them into personalised learning experiences. One-size-fits-one education, at scale.

Philosophical Implications

The shift from monolithic to modular AI architectures isn't merely technical. It embodies a philosophical stance on the nature of intelligence itself. How we build AI systems reveals what we believe intelligence actually is.

Monolithic AI reflects a particular view: that intelligence is fundamentally unified, emerging from a single vast neural network that learns statistical patterns across all domains. Scale begets capability, and comprehensiveness is the path to general intelligence. It's the “one ring to rule them all” approach to AI.

Yet modularity suggests a different understanding entirely. Human cognition isn't truly monolithic. We have specialised brain regions for language, vision, spatial reasoning, emotional processing, and motor control. These regions communicate and coordinate, but they're distinct systems that evolved for specific functions. Intelligence, in this view, is less a unified whole than a society of mind (specialised modules working in concert). We're already modular; maybe AI should be too.

This has profound implications for how we approach artificial general intelligence (AGI). The dominant narrative has been that AGI will emerge from ever-larger monolithic models that achieve sufficient scale to generalise across all cognitive tasks. Just keep making it bigger until consciousness emerges. Modular architectures suggest an alternative path: AGI as a sophisticated orchestration of specialised intelligences, each superhuman in its domain, coordinated by meta-reasoning systems that compose capabilities dynamically. Not one massive brain, but many specialised brains working together.

The distinction matters for AI safety and alignment. Monolithic systems are opaque and difficult to interpret. When a massive model makes a decision, unpacking the reasoning behind it is extraordinarily challenging. It's a black box all the way down. Modular systems, by contrast, offer natural points of inspection and intervention. You can audit individual components, understand how specialised agents contribute to final decisions, and insert safeguards at orchestration layers. Transparency through decomposition.

There's also a practical wisdom in modularity that transcends AI and software. Complex systems that survive and adapt over time tend to be modular. Biological organisms are modular, with specialised organs coordinated through circulatory and nervous systems. Successful organisations are modular, with specialised teams and clear interfaces. Resilient ecosystems are modular, with niches filled by specialised species. Modularity with appropriate interfaces allows components to evolve independently whilst maintaining system coherence. It's a pattern that nature discovered long before we did.

Building Minds, Not Monoliths

The future of AI won't be decided solely by who can build the largest model or accumulate the most training data. It will be shaped by who can most effectively compose specialised capabilities into systems that are efficient, adaptable, and aligned with human needs. Size matters less than architecture.

The evidence surrounds us. MoE models demonstrate that selective activation of specialised components outperforms monolithic density. Multi-agent architectures show that coordinated specialists achieve better results than single generalists. RAG systems prove that composition of retrieval and generation beats encoding all knowledge in parameters. Compound AI systems are replacing single-model deployments in enterprises worldwide. The pattern repeats because it works.

This doesn't mean monolithic AI disappears. Like monolithic applications, which still have legitimate use cases, there will remain scenarios where a single, tightly integrated model makes sense. Simple deployments with narrow scope, situations where integration overhead outweighs benefits, and use cases where the highest-quality monolithic models still outperform modular alternatives will continue to warrant unified approaches. Horses for courses.

But the centre of gravity is shifting unmistakably. The most sophisticated AI systems being built today are modular. The most ambitious roadmaps for future AI emphasise composability. The architectural patterns that will define AI over the next decade look more like microservices than monoliths, more like orchestrated specialists than universal generalists. The future is plural.

This transformation asks us to rethink what we're building fundamentally. Not artificial brains (single organs that do everything) but artificial minds: societies of specialised intelligence working in concert. Not systems that know everything, but systems that know how to find, coordinate, and apply the right knowledge for each situation. Not monolithic giants, but modular assemblies that can evolve component by component whilst maintaining coherence. The metaphor matters because it shapes the architecture.

The future of AI is modular not because modularity is ideologically superior, but because it's practically necessary for building the sophisticated, reliable, adaptable systems that real-world applications demand. Software learned this lesson through painful experience with massive codebases that became impossible to maintain. AI has the opportunity to learn it faster, adopting modular architectures before monolithic approaches calcify into unmaintainable complexity. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

As we stand at this architectural crossroads, the path forward increasingly resembles a microservice mind: specialised, composable, and orchestrated. Not a single model to rule them all, but a symphony of intelligences, each playing its part, coordinated into something greater than the sum of components. This is how we'll build AI that scales not just in parameters and compute, but in capability, reliability, and alignment with human values. The whole really can be greater than the sum of its parts.

The revolution isn't coming. It's already here, reshaping AI from the architecture up. Intelligence, whether artificial or natural, thrives not in monolithic unity but in modular diversity, carefully orchestrated. The future belongs to minds that are composable, not monolithic. The microservice revolution has come to AI, and nothing will be quite the same.


Sources and References

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Tim Green

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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In a computing landscape dominated by the relentless pursuit of scale, where artificial intelligence laboratories compete to build ever-larger models measured in hundreds of billions of parameters, a research team at Samsung has just delivered a profound challenge to the industry's core assumptions. Their Tiny Recursive Model (TRM), weighing in at a mere 7 million parameters, has achieved something remarkable: it outperforms AI giants that are literally 100,000 times its size on complex reasoning tasks.

This isn't just an incremental improvement or a clever optimisation trick. It's a fundamental reconsideration of how artificial intelligence solves problems, and it arrives at a moment when the AI industry faces mounting questions about sustainability, accessibility, and the concentration of power among a handful of technology giants capable of funding billion-dollar training runs.

The implications ripple far beyond academic benchmarks. If small, specialised models can match or exceed the capabilities of massive language models on specific tasks, the entire competitive landscape shifts. Suddenly, advanced AI capabilities become accessible to organisations without access to continent-spanning data centres or nine-figure research budgets. The democratisation of artificial intelligence, long promised but rarely delivered, might finally have its breakthrough moment.

The Benchmark That Humbles Giants

To understand the significance of Samsung's achievement, we need to examine the battlefield where this David defeated Goliath: the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence, better known as ARC-AGI.

Created in 2019 by François Chollet, the renowned software engineer behind the Keras deep learning framework, ARC-AGI represents a different philosophy for measuring artificial intelligence. Rather than testing an AI's accumulated knowledge (what cognitive scientists call crystallised intelligence), ARC-AGI focuses on fluid intelligence: the ability to reason, solve novel problems, and adapt to new situations without relying on memorised patterns or vast training datasets.

The benchmark's puzzles appear deceptively simple. An AI system encounters a grid of coloured squares arranged in patterns. From a handful of examples, it must identify the underlying rule, then apply that reasoning to generate the correct “answer” grid for a new problem. Humans, with their innate pattern recognition and flexible reasoning abilities, solve these puzzles readily. State-of-the-art AI models, despite their billions of parameters and training on trillions of tokens, struggle profoundly.

The difficulty is by design. As the ARC Prize organisation explains, the benchmark embodies the principle of “Easy for Humans, Hard for AI.” It deliberately highlights fundamental gaps in AI's reasoning and adaptability, gaps that cannot be papered over with more training data or additional compute power.

The 2024 ARC Prize competition pushed the state-of-the-art score on the private evaluation set from 33 per cent to 55.5 per cent, propelled by frontier techniques including deep learning-guided program synthesis and test-time training. Yet even these advances left considerable room for improvement.

Then came ARC-AGI-2, released in 2025 as an even more demanding iteration designed to stress-test the efficiency and capability of contemporary AI reasoning systems. The results were humbling for the industry's flagship models. OpenAI's o3-mini-high, positioned as a reasoning-specialised system, managed just 3 per cent accuracy. DeepSeek's R1 achieved 1.3 per cent. Claude 3.7 scored 0.7 per cent. Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro, despite its massive scale and sophisticated architecture, reached only 4.9 per cent.

Samsung's Tiny Recursive Model achieved 7.8 per cent on ARC-AGI-2, and 44.6 per cent on the original ARC-AGI-1 benchmark. For perspective: a model smaller than most mobile phone applications outperformed systems that represent billions of dollars in research investment and require industrial-scale computing infrastructure to operate.

The Architecture of Efficiency

The technical innovation behind TRM centres on a concept its creators call recursive reasoning. Rather than attempting to solve problems through a single forward pass, as traditional large language models do, TRM employs an iterative approach. It examines a problem, generates an answer, then loops back to reconsider that answer, progressively refining its solution through multiple cycles.

This recursive process resembles how humans approach difficult problems. We don't typically solve complex puzzles in a single moment of insight. Instead, we try an approach, evaluate whether it's working, adjust our strategy, and iterate until we find a solution. TRM embeds this iterative refinement directly into its architecture.

Developed by Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau, a senior researcher at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology AI Lab in Montreal, the model demonstrates that architectural elegance can triumph over brute force. The research revealed a counterintuitive finding: a tiny network with only two layers achieved far better generalisation than a four-layer version. This reduction in size appears to prevent the model from overfitting, the tendency for machine learning systems to memorise specific training examples rather than learning general principles.

On the Sudoku-Extreme dataset, TRM achieves 87.4 per cent test accuracy. On Maze-Hard, which tasks models with navigating complex labyrinths, it scored 85 per cent. These results demonstrate genuine reasoning capability, not pattern matching or memorisation. The model is solving problems it has never encountered before by understanding underlying structures and applying logical principles.

The approach has clear limitations. TRM operates effectively only within well-defined grid problems. It cannot handle open-ended questions, text-based tasks, or multimodal challenges that blend vision and language. It is, deliberately and by design, a specialist rather than a generalist.

But that specialisation is precisely the point. Not every problem requires a model trained on the entire internet. Sometimes, a focused tool optimised for a specific domain delivers better results than a general-purpose behemoth.

The Hidden Costs of AI Scale

To appreciate why TRM's efficiency matters, we need to confront the economics and environmental impact of training massive language models.

GPT-3, with its 175 billion parameters, reportedly cost between $500,000 and $4.6 million to train, depending on hardware and optimisation techniques. That model, released in 2020, now seems almost quaint. OpenAI's GPT-4 training costs exceeded $100 million according to industry estimates, with compute expenses alone reaching approximately $78 million. Google's Gemini Ultra model reportedly required $191 million in training compute.

These figures represent only direct costs. Training GPT-3 consumed an estimated 1,287 megawatt-hours of electricity, equivalent to powering roughly 120 average US homes for a year, whilst generating approximately 552 tonnes of carbon dioxide. The GPUs used in that training run required 1,300 megawatt-hours, matching the monthly electricity consumption of 1,450 typical American households.

The trajectory is unsustainable. Data centres already account for 4.4 per cent of all energy consumed in the United States. Global electricity consumption by data centres has grown approximately 12 per cent annually since 2017. The International Energy Agency predicts that global data centre electricity demand will more than double by 2030, reaching around 945 terawatt-hours. Some projections suggest data centres could consume 20 to 21 per cent of global electricity by 2030, with AI alone potentially matching the annual electricity usage of 22 per cent of all US households.

Google reported that its 2023 greenhouse gas emissions marked a 48 per cent increase since 2019, driven predominantly by data centre development. Amazon's emissions rose from 64.38 million metric tonnes in 2023 to 68.25 million metric tonnes in 2024. The environmental cost of AI's scaling paradigm grows increasingly difficult to justify, particularly when models trained at enormous expense often struggle with basic reasoning tasks.

TRM represents a different path. Training a 7-million-parameter model requires a fraction of the compute, energy, and carbon emissions of its giant counterparts. The model can run on modest hardware, potentially even edge devices or mobile processors. This efficiency isn't merely environmentally beneficial; it fundamentally alters who can develop and deploy advanced AI capabilities.

Democratisation Through Specialisation

The concentration of AI capability among a handful of technology giants stems directly from the resource requirements of building and operating massive models. When creating a competitive large language model demands hundreds of millions of dollars, access to state-of-the-art GPUs during a global chip shortage, and teams of world-class researchers, only organisations with extraordinary resources can participate.

This concentration became starkly visible in recent market share data. In the foundation models and platforms market, Microsoft leads with an estimated 39 per cent market share in 2024, whilst AWS secured 19 per cent and Google 15 per cent. In the consumer generative AI tools segment, Meta AI's market share jumped to 31 per cent in 2024, matching ChatGPT's share. Google's Gemini increased from 13 per cent to 27 per cent year-over-year.

Three companies effectively control the majority of generative AI infrastructure and consumer access. Their dominance isn't primarily due to superior innovation but rather superior resources. They can afford the capital expenditure that AI development demands. During Q2 of 2024 alone, technology giants Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon spent $52.9 billion on capital expenses, with a substantial focus on AI development.

The open-source movement has provided some counterbalance. Meta's release of Llama 3.1 in July 2024, described by CEO Mark Zuckerberg as achieving “frontier-level” status, challenged the closed-source paradigm. With 405 billion parameters, Llama 3.1 claimed the title of the world's largest and most capable open-source foundation model. French AI laboratory Mistral followed days later with Mistral Large 2, featuring 123 billion parameters and a 128,000-token context window, reportedly matching or surpassing existing top-tier systems, particularly for multilingual applications.

These developments proved transformative for democratisation. Unlike closed-source models accessible only through paid APIs, open-source alternatives allow developers to download model weights, customise them for specific needs, train them on new datasets, fine-tune them for particular domains, and run them on local hardware without vendor lock-in. Smaller companies and individual developers gained access to sophisticated AI capabilities without the hefty price tags associated with proprietary systems.

Yet even open-source models measuring in the hundreds of billions of parameters demand substantial resources to deploy and fine-tune. Running inference on a 405-billion-parameter model requires expensive hardware, significant energy consumption, and technical expertise. Democratisation remained partial, extending access to well-funded startups and research institutions whilst remaining out of reach for smaller organisations, independent researchers, and developers in regions without access to cutting-edge infrastructure.

Small, specialised models like TRM change this equation fundamentally. A 7-million-parameter model can run on a laptop. It requires minimal energy, trains quickly, and can be modified and experimented with by developers without access to GPU clusters. If specialised models can match or exceed general-purpose giants on specific tasks, then organisations can achieve state-of-the-art performance on their particular use cases without needing the resources of a technology giant.

Consider the implications for edge computing and Internet of Things applications. The global edge computing devices market is anticipated to grow to nearly $43.03 billion by 2030, recording a compound annual growth rate of approximately 22.35 per cent between 2023 and 2030. Embedded World 2024 emphasised the growing role of edge AI within IoT systems, with developments focused on easier AI inferencing and a spectrum of edge AI solutions.

Deploying massive language models on edge devices remains impractical. The computational and storage demands of models with hundreds of billions of parameters far exceed what resource-constrained devices can handle. Even with aggressive quantization and compression, bringing frontier-scale models to edge devices requires compromises that significantly degrade performance.

Small specialised models eliminate this barrier. A model with 7 million parameters can run directly on edge devices, performing real-time inference without requiring cloud connectivity, reducing latency, preserving privacy, and enabling AI capabilities in environments where constant internet access isn't available or desirable. From industrial sensors analysing equipment performance to medical devices processing patient data, from agricultural monitors assessing crop conditions to environmental sensors tracking ecosystem health, specialised AI models can bring advanced reasoning capabilities to contexts where massive models simply cannot operate.

The Competitive Landscape Transformed

The shift towards efficient, specialised AI models doesn't merely democratise access; it fundamentally restructures competitive dynamics in the artificial intelligence industry.

Large technology companies have pursued a particular strategy: build massive general-purpose models that can handle virtually any task, then monetise access through API calls or subscription services. This approach creates powerful moats. The capital requirements to build competing models at frontier scale are prohibitive. Even well-funded AI startups struggle to match the resources available to hyperscale cloud providers.

OpenAI leads the AI startup landscape with $11.3 billion in funding, followed by Anthropic with $7.7 billion and Databricks with $4 billion. Yet even these figures pale beside the resources of their corporate partners and competitors. Microsoft has invested billions into OpenAI and now owns 49 per cent of the startup. Alphabet and Amazon have likewise invested billions into Anthropic.

This concentration of capital led some observers to conclude that the era of foundation models would see only a handful of firms, armed with vast compute resources, proprietary data, and entrenched ecosystems, dominating the market. Smaller players would be relegated to building applications atop these foundation models, capturing marginal value whilst the platform providers extracted the majority of economic returns.

The emergence of efficient specialised models disrupts this trajectory. If a small research team can build a model that outperforms billion-dollar systems on important tasks, the competitive moat shrinks dramatically. Startups can compete not by matching the scale of technology giants but by delivering superior performance on specific high-value problems.

This dynamic has historical precedents in software engineering. During the early decades of computing, complex enterprise software required substantial resources to develop and deploy, favouring large established vendors. The open-source movement, combined with improvements in development tools and cloud infrastructure, lowered barriers to entry. Nimble startups could build focused tools that solved specific problems better than general-purpose enterprise suites, capturing market share by delivering superior value for particular use cases.

We may be witnessing a similar transformation in artificial intelligence. Rather than a future where a few general-purpose models dominate all use cases, we might see an ecosystem of specialised models, each optimised for particular domains, tasks, or constraints. Some applications will continue to benefit from massive general-purpose models with broad knowledge and capability. Others will be better served by lean specialists that operate efficiently, deploy easily, and deliver superior performance for their specific domain.

DeepSeek's release of its R1 reasoning model exemplifies this shift. Reportedly requiring only modest capital investment compared to the hundreds of millions or billions typically spent by Western counterparts, DeepSeek demonstrated that thoughtful architecture and focused optimisation could achieve competitive performance without matching the spending of technology giants. If state-of-the-art models are no longer the exclusive preserve of well-capitalised firms, the resulting competition could accelerate innovation whilst reducing costs for end users.

The implications extend beyond commercial competition to geopolitical considerations. AI capability has become a strategic priority for nations worldwide, yet the concentration of advanced AI development in a handful of American companies raises concerns about dependency and technological sovereignty. Countries and regions seeking to develop domestic AI capabilities face enormous barriers when state-of-the-art requires billion-dollar investments in infrastructure and talent.

Efficient specialised models lower these barriers. A nation or research institution can develop world-class capabilities in particular domains without matching the aggregate spending of technology leaders. Rather than attempting to build a GPT-4 competitor, they can focus resources on specialised models for healthcare, materials science, climate modelling, or other areas of strategic importance. This shift from scale-dominated competition to specialisation-enabled diversity could prove geopolitically stabilising, reducing the concentration of AI capability whilst fostering innovation across a broader range of institutions and nations.

The Technical Renaissance Ahead

Samsung's Tiny Recursive Model represents just one example of a broader movement rethinking the fundamentals of AI architecture. Across research laboratories worldwide, teams are exploring alternative approaches that challenge the assumption that bigger is always better.

Parameter-efficient techniques like low-rank adaptation, quantisation, and neural architecture search enable models to achieve strong performance with reduced computational requirements. Massive sparse expert models utilise architectures that activate only relevant parameter subsets for each input, significantly cutting computational costs whilst preserving the model's understanding. DeepSeek-V3, for instance, features 671 billion total parameters but activates only 37 billion per token, achieving impressive efficiency gains.

The rise of small language models has become a defining trend. HuggingFace CEO Clem Delangue suggested that up to 99 per cent of use cases could be addressed using small language models, predicting 2024 would be their breakthrough year. That prediction has proven prescient. Microsoft unveiled Phi-3-mini, demonstrating how smaller AI models prove effective for business applications. Google introduced Gemma, a series of small language models designed for efficiency and user-friendliness. According to research, the Diabetica-7B model achieved 87.2 per cent accuracy, surpassing GPT-4 and Claude 3.5, whilst Mistral 7B outperformed Meta's Llama 2 13B across various benchmarks.

These developments signal a maturation of the field. The initial phase of deep learning's renaissance focused understandably on demonstrating capability. Researchers pushed models larger to establish what neural networks could achieve with sufficient scale. Having demonstrated that capability, the field now enters a phase focused on efficiency, specialisation, and practical deployment.

This evolution mirrors patterns in other technologies. Early mainframe computers filled rooms and consumed enormous amounts of power. Personal computers delivered orders of magnitude less raw performance but proved transformative because they were accessible, affordable, and adequate for a vast range of valuable tasks. Early mobile phones were expensive, bulky devices with limited functionality. Modern smartphones pack extraordinary capability into pocket-sized packages. Technologies often begin with impressive but impractical demonstrations of raw capability, then mature into efficient, specialised tools that deliver practical value at scale.

Artificial intelligence appears to be following this trajectory. The massive language models developed over recent years demonstrated impressive capabilities, proving that neural networks could generate coherent text, answer questions, write code, and perform reasoning tasks. Having established these capabilities, attention now turns to making them practical: more efficient, more accessible, more specialised, more reliable, and more aligned with human values and needs.

Recursive reasoning, the technique powering TRM, exemplifies this shift. Rather than solving problems through brute-force pattern matching on enormous training datasets, recursive approaches embed iterative refinement directly into the architecture. The model reasons about problems, evaluates its reasoning, and progressively improves its solutions. This approach aligns more closely with how humans solve difficult problems and how cognitive scientists understand human reasoning.

Other emerging architectures explore different aspects of efficient intelligence. Retrieval-augmented generation combines compact language models with external knowledge bases, allowing systems to access vast information whilst keeping the model itself small. Neuro-symbolic approaches integrate neural networks with symbolic reasoning systems, aiming to capture both the pattern recognition strengths of deep learning and the logical reasoning capabilities of traditional AI. Continual learning systems adapt to new information without requiring complete retraining, enabling models to stay current without the computational cost of periodic full-scale training runs.

Researchers are also developing sophisticated techniques for model compression and efficiency. MIT Lincoln Laboratory has created methods that can reduce the energy required for training AI models by 80 per cent. MIT's Clover software tool makes carbon intensity a parameter in model training, reducing carbon intensity for different operations by approximately 80 to 90 per cent. Power-capping GPUs can reduce energy consumption by about 12 to 15 per cent without significantly impacting performance.

These technical advances compound each other. Efficient architectures combined with compression techniques, specialised training methods, and hardware optimisations create a multiplicative effect. A model that's inherently 100 times smaller than its predecessors, trained using methods that reduce energy consumption by 80 per cent, running on optimised hardware that cuts power usage by 15 per cent, represents a transformation in the practical economics and accessibility of artificial intelligence.

Challenges and Limitations

Enthusiasm for small specialised models must be tempered with clear-eyed assessment of their limitations and the challenges ahead.

TRM's impressive performance on ARC-AGI benchmarks doesn't translate to general-purpose language tasks. The model excels at grid-based reasoning puzzles but cannot engage in conversation, answer questions about history, write creative fiction, or perform the myriad tasks that general-purpose language models handle routinely. Specialisation brings efficiency and performance on specific tasks but sacrifices breadth.

This trade-off is fundamental, not incidental. A model optimised for one type of reasoning may perform poorly on others. The architectural choices that make TRM exceptional at abstract grid puzzles might make it unsuitable for natural language processing, computer vision, or multimodal understanding. Building practical AI systems will require carefully matching model capabilities to task requirements, a more complex challenge than simply deploying a general-purpose model for every application.

Moreover, whilst small specialised models democratise access to AI capabilities, they don't eliminate technical barriers entirely. Building, training, and deploying machine learning models still requires expertise in data science, software engineering, and the particular domain being addressed. Fine-tuning a pre-trained model for a specific use case demands understanding of transfer learning, appropriate datasets, evaluation metrics, and deployment infrastructure. Smaller models lower the computational barriers but not necessarily the knowledge barriers.

The economic implications of this shift remain uncertain. If specialised models prove superior for specific high-value tasks, we might see market fragmentation, with different providers offering different specialised models rather than a few general-purpose systems dominating the landscape. This fragmentation could increase complexity for enterprises, which might need to manage relationships with multiple AI providers, integrate various specialised models, and navigate an ecosystem without clear standards or interoperability guarantees.

There's also the question of capability ceilings. Large language models' impressive emergent abilities appear partially due to scale. Certain capabilities manifest only when models reach particular parameter thresholds. If small specialised models cannot access these emergent abilities, there may be fundamental tasks that remain beyond their reach, regardless of architectural innovations.

The environmental benefits of small models, whilst significant, don't automatically solve AI's sustainability challenges. If the ease of training and deploying small models leads to proliferation, with thousands of organisations training specialised models for particular tasks, the aggregate environmental impact could remain substantial. Just as personal computing's energy efficiency gains were partially offset by the explosive growth in the number of devices, small AI models' efficiency could be offset by their ubiquity.

Security and safety considerations also evolve in this landscape. Large language model providers can implement safety measures, content filtering, and alignment techniques at the platform level. If specialised models proliferate, with numerous organisations training and deploying their own systems, ensuring consistent safety standards becomes more challenging. A democratised AI ecosystem requires democratised access to safety tools and alignment techniques, areas where research and practical resources remain limited.

The Path Forward

Despite these challenges, the trajectory seems clear. The AI industry is moving beyond the scaling paradigm that dominated the past several years towards a more nuanced understanding of intelligence, efficiency, and practical value.

This evolution doesn't mean large language models will disappear or become irrelevant. General-purpose models with broad knowledge and diverse capabilities serve important functions. They provide excellent starting points for fine-tuning, handle tasks that require integration of knowledge across many domains, and offer user-friendly interfaces for exploration and experimentation. The technology giants investing billions in frontier models aren't making irrational bets; they're pursuing genuine value.

But the monoculture of ever-larger models is giving way to a diverse ecosystem where different approaches serve different needs. Some applications will use massive general-purpose models. Others will employ small specialised systems. Still others will combine approaches, using retrieval augmentation, mixture of experts architectures, or cascaded systems that route queries to appropriate specialised models based on task requirements.

For developers and organisations, this evolution expands options dramatically. Rather than facing a binary choice between building atop a few platforms controlled by technology giants or attempting the prohibitively expensive task of training competitive general-purpose models, they can explore specialised models tailored to their specific domains and constraints.

For researchers, the shift towards efficiency and specialisation opens new frontiers. The focus moves from simply scaling existing architectures to developing novel approaches that achieve intelligence through elegance rather than brute force. This is intellectually richer territory, requiring deeper understanding of reasoning, learning, and adaptation rather than primarily engineering challenges of distributed computing and massive-scale infrastructure.

For society, the democratisation enabled by efficient specialised models offers hope of broader participation in AI development and governance. When advanced AI capabilities are accessible to diverse organisations, researchers, and communities worldwide, the technology is more likely to reflect diverse values, address diverse needs, and distribute benefits more equitably.

The environmental implications are profound. If the AI industry can deliver advancing capabilities whilst reducing rather than exploding energy consumption and carbon emissions, artificial intelligence becomes more sustainable as a long-term technology. The current trajectory, where capability advances require exponentially increasing resource consumption, is fundamentally unsustainable. Efficient specialised models offer a path towards an AI ecosystem that can scale capabilities without proportionally scaling environmental impact.

Beyond the Scaling Paradigm

Samsung's Tiny Recursive Model is unlikely to be the last word in efficient specialised AI. It's better understood as an early example of what becomes possible when researchers question fundamental assumptions and explore alternative approaches to intelligence.

The model's achievement on ARC-AGI benchmarks demonstrates that for certain types of reasoning, architectural elegance and iterative refinement can outperform brute-force scaling. This doesn't invalidate the value of large models but reveals the possibility space is far richer than the industry's recent focus on scale would suggest.

The implications cascade through technical, economic, environmental, and geopolitical dimensions. Lower barriers to entry foster competition and innovation. Reduced resource requirements improve sustainability. Broader access to advanced capabilities distributes power more equitably.

We're witnessing not merely an incremental advance but a potential inflection point. The assumption that artificial general intelligence requires ever-larger models trained at ever-greater expense may prove mistaken. Perhaps intelligence, even general intelligence, emerges not from scale alone but from the right architectures, learning processes, and reasoning mechanisms.

This possibility transforms the competitive landscape. Success in artificial intelligence may depend less on raw resources and more on innovative approaches to efficiency, specialisation, and practical deployment. Nimble research teams with novel ideas become competitive with technology giants. Startups can carve out valuable niches through specialised models that outperform general-purpose systems in particular domains. Open-source communities can contribute meaningfully to frontier capabilities.

The democratisation of AI, so often promised but rarely delivered, might finally be approaching. Not because foundation models became free and open, though open-source initiatives help significantly. Not because compute costs dropped to zero, though efficiency improvements matter greatly. But because the path to state-of-the-art performance on valuable tasks doesn't require the resources of a technology giant if you're willing to specialise, optimise, and innovate architecturally.

What happens when a graduate student at a university, a researcher at a non-profit, a developer at a startup, or an engineer at a medium-sized company can build models that outperform billion-dollar systems on problems they care about? The playing field levels. Innovation accelerates. Diverse perspectives and values shape the technology's development.

Samsung's 7-million-parameter model outperforming systems 100,000 times its size is more than an impressive benchmark result. It's a proof of concept for a different future, one where intelligence isn't synonymous with scale, where efficiency enables accessibility, and where specialisation defeats generalisation on the tasks that matter most to the broadest range of people and organisations.

The age of ever-larger models isn't necessarily ending, but its monopoly on the future of AI is breaking. What emerges next may be far more interesting, diverse, and beneficial than a future dominated by a handful of massive general-purpose models controlled by the most resource-rich organisations. The tiny revolution is just beginning.


Sources and References

  1. SiliconANGLE. (2025). “Samsung researchers create tiny AI model that shames the biggest LLMs in reasoning puzzles.” Retrieved from https://siliconangle.com/2025/10/09/samsung-researchers-create-tiny-ai-model-shames-biggest-llms-reasoning-puzzles/

  2. ARC Prize. (2024). “What is ARC-AGI?” Retrieved from https://arcprize.org/arc-agi

  3. ARC Prize. (2024). “ARC Prize 2024: Technical Report.” arXiv:2412.04604v2. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/html/2412.04604v2

  4. Jolicoeur-Martineau, A. et al. (2025). “Less is More: Recursive Reasoning with Tiny Networks.” arXiv:2510.04871. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/html/2510.04871v1

  5. TechCrunch. (2025). “A new, challenging AGI test stumps most AI models.” Retrieved from https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/24/a-new-challenging-agi-test-stumps-most-ai-models/

  6. Cudo Compute. “What is the cost of training large language models?” Retrieved from https://www.cudocompute.com/blog/what-is-the-cost-of-training-large-language-models

  7. MIT News. (2025). “Responding to the climate impact of generative AI.” Retrieved from https://news.mit.edu/2025/responding-to-generative-ai-climate-impact-0930

  8. Penn State Institute of Energy and Environment. “AI's Energy Demand: Challenges and Solutions for a Sustainable Future.” Retrieved from https://iee.psu.edu/news/blog/why-ai-uses-so-much-energy-and-what-we-can-do-about-it

  9. VentureBeat. (2024). “Silicon Valley shaken as open-source AI models Llama 3.1 and Mistral Large 2 match industry leaders.” Retrieved from https://venturebeat.com/ai/silicon-valley-shaken-as-open-source-ai-models-llama-3-1-and-mistral-large-2-match-industry-leaders

  10. IoT Analytics. “The leading generative AI companies.” Retrieved from https://iot-analytics.com/leading-generative-ai-companies/

  11. DC Velocity. (2024). “Google matched Open AI's generative AI market share in 2024.” Retrieved from https://www.dcvelocity.com/google-matched-open-ais-generative-ai-market-share-in-2024

  12. IoT Analytics. (2024). “The top 6 edge AI trends—as showcased at Embedded World 2024.” Retrieved from https://iot-analytics.com/top-6-edge-ai-trends-as-showcased-at-embedded-world-2024/

  13. Institute for New Economic Thinking. “Breaking the Moat: DeepSeek and the Democratization of AI.” Retrieved from https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/breaking-the-moat-deepseek-and-the-democratization-of-ai

  14. VentureBeat. “Why small language models are the next big thing in AI.” Retrieved from https://venturebeat.com/ai/why-small-language-models-are-the-next-big-thing-in-ai/

  15. Microsoft Corporation. (2024). “Explore AI models: Key differences between small language models and large language models.” Retrieved from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-cloud/blog/2024/11/11/explore-ai-models-key-differences-between-small-language-models-and-large-language-models/


Tim Green

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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When Ring employees accessed thousands of video recordings from customers' bedrooms and bathrooms without their knowledge, it wasn't a sophisticated hack or a targeted attack. It was simply business as usual. According to the Federal Trade Commission's 2023 settlement with Amazon's Ring division, one employee viewed recordings of female customers in intimate spaces, whilst any employee or contractor could freely access and download customer videos with virtually no restrictions until July 2017. The company paid £5.6 million in refunds to affected customers, but the damage to trust was incalculable.

This wasn't an isolated incident. It's a symptom of a broader crisis facing consumers as artificial intelligence seeps into every corner of domestic life. From smart speakers that listen to your conversations to robot vacuums that map your home's layout, AI-powered consumer devices promise convenience whilst collecting unprecedented amounts of personal data. The question isn't whether these devices pose security risks (they do), but rather how to evaluate those risks and what standards manufacturers should meet before their products enter your home.

The Growing Attack Surface in Your Living Room

The numbers tell a sobering story. Attacks on smart home devices surged 124% in 2024, according to cybersecurity firm SonicWall, which prevented more than 17 million attacks on IP cameras alone during the year. IoT malware attacks have jumped nearly 400% in recent years, and smart home products now face up to 10 attacks every single day.

The attack surface expands with every new device. When you add a smart speaker, a connected doorbell, or an AI-powered security camera to your network, you're creating a potential entry point for attackers, a data collection node for manufacturers, and a vulnerability that could persist for years. The European Union's Radio Equipment Directive and the United Kingdom's Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Regulations, both implemented in 2024, acknowledge this reality by mandating minimum security standards for IoT devices. Yet compliance doesn't guarantee safety.

Consumer sentiment reflects the growing unease. According to Pew Research Center, 81% of consumers believe information collected by AI companies will be used in ways people find uncomfortable or that weren't originally intended. Deloitte's 2024 Connected Consumer survey found that 63% worry about generative AI compromising privacy through data breaches or unauthorised access. Perhaps most telling: 75% feel they should be doing more to protect themselves, but many express powerlessness, believing companies can track them regardless of precautions (26%), not knowing what actions to take (25%), or thinking hackers can access their data no matter what they do (21%).

This isn't unfounded paranoia. Research published in 2024 demonstrated that GPT-4 can autonomously exploit real-world security vulnerabilities with an 87% success rate when provided with publicly available CVE data. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers who conducted the study found that GPT-4 was the only large language model capable of writing malicious scripts to exploit known vulnerabilities, bringing exploit development time down to less than 15 minutes in many cases.

When Devices Betray Your Trust

High-profile security failures provide the clearest lessons about what can go wrong. Ring's troubles extended beyond employee surveillance. The FTC complaint detailed how approximately 55,000 US customers suffered serious account compromises during a period when Ring failed to implement necessary protections against credential stuffing and brute force attacks. Attackers gained access to accounts, then harassed, insulted, and propositioned children and teens through their bedroom cameras. The settlement required Ring to implement stringent security controls, including mandatory multi-factor authentication.

Verkada, a cloud-based security camera company, faced similar accountability in 2024. The FTC charged that Verkada failed to use appropriate information security practices, allowing a hacker to access internet-connected cameras and view patients in psychiatric hospitals and women's health clinics. Verkada agreed to pay £2.95 million, the largest penalty obtained by the FTC for a CAN-SPAM Act violation, whilst also committing to comprehensive security improvements.

Robot vacuums present a particularly instructive case study in AI-powered data collection. Modern models use cameras or LIDAR to create detailed floor plans of entire homes. In 2024, security researchers at DEF CON revealed significant vulnerabilities in Ecovacs Deebot vacuums, including evidence that the devices were surreptitiously capturing photos and recording audio, then transmitting this data to the manufacturer to train artificial intelligence models. When images from iRobot's development Roomba J7 series were leaked to Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers globally to label data for AI training, the images included sensitive scenes captured inside homes. Consumer Reports found that none of the robotic vacuum companies in their tests earned high marks for data privacy, with information provided being “vague at best” regarding what data is collected and usage practices.

Smart speakers like Amazon's Alexa and Google Home continuously process audio to detect wake words, and Amazon stores these recordings indefinitely by default (though users can opt out). In 2018, an Alexa user was mistakenly granted access to approximately 1,700 audio files from a stranger's Echo, providing enough information to identify and locate the person and his girlfriend.

IntelliVision Technologies, which sells facial recognition software used in home security systems, came under FTC scrutiny in December 2024 for making false claims that its AI-powered facial recognition was free from gender and racial bias. The proposed consent order prohibits the San Jose-based company from misrepresenting the accuracy of its software across different genders, ethnicities, and skin tones. Each violation could result in civil penalties up to £51,744.

These enforcement actions signal a regulatory shift. The FTC brought 89 data security cases through 2023, with multiple actions specifically targeting smart device manufacturers' failure to protect consumer data. Yet enforcement is reactive, addressing problems after consumers have been harmed.

Understanding the Technical Vulnerabilities That Actually Matter

Not all vulnerabilities are created equal. Some technical weaknesses pose existential threats to device security, whilst others represent minor inconveniences. Understanding the distinction helps consumers prioritise evaluation criteria.

Weak authentication stands out as the most critical vulnerability. Many devices ship with default passwords that users rarely change, creating trivial entry points for attackers. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of three baseline requirements for IoT device security is banning universal default passwords. The UK's PSTI Regulations, which took effect in April 2024, made this legally mandatory for most internet-connected products sold to UK consumers.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) represents the gold standard for access control, yet adoption remains inconsistent across consumer AI devices. When Ring finally implemented mandatory MFA following FTC action, it demonstrated that technical solutions exist but aren't universally deployed until regulators or public pressure demand them.

Encryption protects data both in transit and at rest, yet implementation varies dramatically. End-to-end encryption ensures that data remains encrypted from the device until it reaches its intended destination, making interception useless without decryption keys. Ring expanded end-to-end encryption to more cameras and doorbells following privacy criticism, a move praised by Consumer Reports' test engineers who noted that such encryption is rare in consumer IoT devices. With end-to-end encryption, recorded footage can only be viewed on authorised devices, preventing even the manufacturer from accessing content.

Firmware update mechanisms determine whether devices remain secure over their operational lifetime. The PSTI Regulations require manufacturers to provide clear information about minimum security update periods, establishing transparency about how long devices will receive patches. Yet an Ubuntu survey revealed that 40% of consumers have never consciously performed device updates or don't know how, highlighting the gap between technical capability and user behaviour. Over-the-air (OTA) updates address this through automatic background installation, but they introduce their own risks if not cryptographically signed to prevent malicious code injection.

Network architecture plays an underappreciated role in limiting breach impact. Security professionals recommend network segmentation to isolate IoT devices from critical systems. The simplest approach uses guest networks available on most consumer routers, placing all smart home devices on a separate network from computers and phones containing sensitive information. More sophisticated implementations employ virtual local area networks (VLANs) to create multiple isolated subnetworks with different security profiles. If a robot vacuum is compromised, network segmentation prevents attackers from pivoting to access personal computers or network-attached storage.

The Adversarial AI Threat You Haven't Considered

Beyond traditional cybersecurity concerns, AI-powered consumer devices face unique threats from adversarial artificial intelligence, attacks that manipulate machine learning models through carefully crafted inputs. These attacks exploit fundamental characteristics of how AI systems learn and make decisions.

Adversarial attacks create inputs with subtle, nearly imperceptible alterations that cause models to misclassify data or behave incorrectly. Research has shown that attackers can issue commands to smart speakers like Alexa in ways that avoid detection, potentially controlling home automation, making unauthorised purchases, and eavesdropping on users. The 2022 “Alexa versus Alexa” (AvA) vulnerability demonstrated these risks concretely.

Tenable Research discovered three vulnerabilities in Google's Gemini AI assistant suite in 2024 and 2025 (subsequently remediated) that exposed users to severe privacy risks. These included a prompt-injection vulnerability in Google Cloud's Gemini Cloud Assist tool, a search-injection vulnerability allowing attackers to control Gemini's behaviour and potentially leak users' saved information and location data, and flaws enabling data exfiltration.

The hardware layer introduces additional concerns. Researchers disclosed a vulnerability named GATEBLEED in 2025 that allows attackers with access to servers using machine learning accelerators to determine what data trained AI systems and leak private information. Industry statistics underscore the scope: 77% of companies identified AI-related breaches, with two in five organisations experiencing an AI privacy breach or security incident. Of those incidents, one in four were malicious attacks rather than accidental exposures.

Emerging Standards and What They Actually Mean for You

The regulatory landscape for AI consumer device security is evolving rapidly. Understanding what these standards require helps consumers evaluate whether manufacturers meet baseline expectations.

NIST Special Publication 800-213 series provides overall guidance for integrating IoT devices into information systems using risk-based cybersecurity approaches. NISTIR 8259A outlines six core capabilities that IoT devices should possess: device identification, device configuration, data protection, logical access to interfaces, software updates, and cybersecurity state awareness. These technical requirements inform multiple regulatory programmes.

The Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020 generally prohibits US federal agencies from procuring or using IoT devices after 4 December 2022 if they don't comply with NIST-developed standards. This legislation established the first federal regulatory floor for IoT security in the United States.

The EU's Radio Equipment Directive introduced cybersecurity requirements for consumer products as an addition to existing safety regulations, with enforcement extended to August 2025 to give manufacturers adequate time to achieve compliance. The requirements align with the UK's PSTI Regulations: prohibiting universal default passwords, implementing vulnerability management processes, and providing clear information about security update periods.

The Cyber Resilience Act, approved by European Parliament in March 2024, will apply three years after entry into force, establishing comprehensive cybersecurity requirements for products with digital elements throughout their lifecycle, creating manufacturer obligations for security-by-design, vulnerability handling, and post-market monitoring.

The US Cyber Trust Mark, established by the Federal Communications Commission with rules effective August 29, 2024, creates a voluntary cybersecurity labelling programme for wireless consumer IoT products. Eligible products include internet-connected home security cameras, voice-activated shopping devices, smart appliances, fitness trackers, garage door openers, and baby monitors. Products meeting technical requirements based on NIST Report 8425 can display the Cyber Trust Mark label with an accompanying QR code that consumers scan to access security information about the specific product. According to one survey, 37% of US households consider Matter certification either important or critical to purchase decisions, suggesting consumer appetite for security labels if awareness increases.

Matter represents a complementary approach focused on interoperability rather than security, though the two concerns intersect. Developed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (founded by Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance), Matter provides a technical standard for smart home and IoT devices ensuring compatibility across different manufacturers. Version 1.4, released in November 2024, expanded support to batteries, solar systems, home routers, water heaters, and heat pumps. The alliance's Product Security Working Group introduced an IoT Device Security Specification in 2023 based on ETSI EN 303 645 and NIST IR 8425, with products launching in 2024 able to display a Verified Mark demonstrating security compliance.

A Practical Framework for Evaluating Devices Before Purchase

Given the complexity of security considerations and opacity of manufacturer practices, consumers need a systematic framework for evaluation before bringing AI-powered devices into their homes.

Authentication mechanisms should be your first checkpoint. Does the device support multi-factor authentication? Will it force you to change default passwords during setup? These basic requirements separate minimally secure devices from fundamentally vulnerable ones. Reject products that don't support MFA for accounts controlling security cameras, smart locks, or voice assistants with purchasing capabilities.

Encryption standards determine data protection during transmission and storage. Look for devices supporting end-to-end encryption, particularly for cameras and audio devices capturing intimate moments. Products using Transport Layer Security (TLS) for network communication and AES encryption for stored data meet baseline requirements. Be suspicious of devices that don't clearly document encryption standards.

Update commitments reveal manufacturer intentions for long-term security support. Look for manufacturers promising at least three years of security updates, ideally longer. Over-the-air update capability matters because manual updates depend on consumer vigilance that research shows is inconsistent. Cryptographic signing of firmware updates prevents malicious code injection during the update process.

Certification and compliance demonstrate third-party validation. As the Cyber Trust Mark programme matures, look for its label on eligible products. Matter certification indicates interoperability testing but also suggests manufacturer engagement with industry standards bodies. For European consumers, CE marking now incorporates cybersecurity requirements under the Radio Equipment Directive.

Data practices require scrutiny beyond privacy policies. What data does the device collect? Where is it stored? Who can access it? Is it used for AI training or advertising? How long is it retained? Can you delete it? Consumer advocacy organisations like Consumer Reports increasingly evaluate privacy alongside functionality in product reviews. Research whether the company has faced FTC enforcement actions or data breaches. Past behaviour predicts future practices better than policy language.

Local processing versus cloud dependence affects both privacy and resilience. Devices performing AI processing locally rather than in the cloud reduce data exposure and function during internet outages. Apple's approach with on-device Siri processing and Amazon's local voice processing for basic Alexa commands demonstrate the feasibility of edge AI for consumer devices. Evaluate whether device features genuinely require cloud connectivity or whether it serves primarily to enable data collection and vendor lock-in.

Reputation and transparency separate responsible manufacturers from problematic ones. Has the company responded constructively to security research? Do they maintain public vulnerability disclosure processes? What's their track record with previous products? Manufacturers treating security researchers as adversaries rather than allies, or those without clear channels for vulnerability reporting, signal organisational cultures that deprioritise security.

What Manufacturers Should Be Required to Demonstrate

Current regulations establish minimum baselines, but truly secure AI consumer devices require manufacturers to meet higher standards than legal compliance demands.

Security-by-design should be mandatory, not aspirational. Products must incorporate security considerations throughout development, not retrofitted after feature completion. For AI devices, this means threat modelling adversarial attacks, implementing defence mechanisms against model manipulation, and designing failure modes that preserve user safety and privacy.

Transparency in data practices must extend beyond legal minimums. Manufacturers should clearly disclose what data is collected, how it's processed, where it's stored, who can access it, how long it's retained, and what happens during model training. This information should be accessible before purchase, not buried in privacy policies accepted during setup.

Regular security audits by independent third parties should be standard practice. Independent security assessments by qualified firms provide verification that security controls function as claimed. Results should be public (with appropriate redaction of exploitable details), allowing consumers and researchers to assess device security.

Vulnerability disclosure and bug bounty programmes signal manufacturer commitment. Companies should maintain clear processes for security researchers to report vulnerabilities, with defined timelines for acknowledgment, remediation, and public disclosure. Manufacturers treating vulnerability reports as hostile acts or threatening researchers with legal action demonstrate cultures incompatible with responsible security practices.

End-of-life planning protects consumers from orphaned devices. Products must have defined support lifecycles with clear communication about end-of-support dates. When support ends, manufacturers should provide options: open-sourcing firmware to enable community maintenance, offering trade-in programmes for newer models, or implementing local-only operating modes that don't depend on discontinued cloud services.

Data minimisation should guide collection practices. Collect only data necessary for product functionality, not everything technically feasible. When Ecovacs vacuums collected audio and photos beyond navigation requirements, they violated data minimisation principles. Federated learning and differential privacy offer technical approaches that improve models without centralising sensitive data.

Human oversight of automated decisions matters for consequential choices. When AI controls physical security systems, makes purchasing decisions, or interacts with vulnerable users like children, human review becomes essential. IntelliVision's false bias claims highlighted the need for validation when AI makes decisions about people.

Practical Steps You Can Take Right Now

Understanding evaluation frameworks and manufacturer obligations provides necessary context, but consumers need actionable steps to improve security of devices already in their homes whilst making better decisions about future purchases.

Conduct an inventory audit of every connected device in your home. List each product, its manufacturer, when you purchased it, whether it has a camera or microphone, what data it collects, and whether you've changed default passwords. This inventory reveals your attack surface and identifies priorities for security improvements.

Enable multi-factor authentication immediately on every device and service that supports it. This single step provides the most significant security improvement for the least effort. Use authenticator apps like Authy, Google Authenticator, or Microsoft Authenticator rather than SMS-based codes when possible, as SMS can be intercepted through SIM swapping attacks.

Change all default passwords to strong, unique credentials managed through a password manager. Password managers like Bitwarden, 1Password, or KeePassXC generate and securely store complex passwords, removing the burden of memorisation whilst enabling unique credentials for each device and service.

Segment your network to isolate IoT devices from computers and phones. At minimum, create a guest network on your router and move all smart home devices to it. This limits blast radius if a device is compromised. For more advanced protection, investigate whether your router supports VLANs and create separate networks for trusted devices, IoT products, guests, and sensitive infrastructure. Brands like UniFi, Firewalla, and Synology offer consumer-accessible products with VLAN capability.

Review and restrict permissions for all device applications. Mobile apps controlling smart home devices often request excessive permissions beyond operational requirements. iOS and Android both allow granular permission management. Revoke location access unless genuinely necessary, limit microphone and camera access, and disable background data usage where possible.

Disable features you don't use, particularly those involving cameras, microphones, or data sharing. Many devices enable all capabilities by default to showcase features, but unused functionality creates unnecessary risk. Feature minimisation reduces attack surface and data collection.

Configure privacy settings to minimise data collection and retention. For Alexa, enable automatic deletion of recordings after three months (the shortest option). For Google, ensure recording storage is disabled. Review settings for every device to understand and minimise data retention. Where possible, opt out of data sharing for AI training, product improvement, or advertising.

Research products thoroughly before purchase using multiple sources. Consult Consumer Reports, WIRED product reviews, and specialised publications covering the device category. Search for “product name security vulnerability” and “product name FTC” to uncover past problems. Check whether manufacturers have faced enforcement actions or breaches.

Question necessity before adding new connected devices. The most secure device is one you don't buy. Does the AI feature genuinely improve your life, or is it novelty that will wear off? The security and privacy costs of connected devices are ongoing and indefinite, whilst perceived benefits often prove temporary.

The Collective Action Problem

Individual consumer actions matter, but they don't solve the structural problems in AI device security. Market dynamics create incentives for manufacturers to prioritise features and time-to-market over security and privacy. Information asymmetry favours manufacturers who control technical details and data practices. Switching costs lock consumers into ecosystems even when better alternatives emerge.

Regulatory intervention addresses market failures individual action can't solve. The PSTI Regulations banning default passwords prevent manufacturers from shipping fundamentally insecure products regardless of consumer vigilance. The Cyber Trust Mark programme provides point-of-purchase information consumers couldn't otherwise access. FTC enforcement actions penalise privacy violations and establish precedents that change manufacturer behaviour across industries.

Yet regulations lag technical evolution and typically respond to problems after they've harmed consumers. The Ring settlement came years after employee surveillance began. Verkada's penalties followed after patients in psychiatric hospitals were exposed. Enforcement is reactive, addressing yesterday's vulnerabilities whilst new risks emerge from advancing AI capabilities.

Consumer advocacy organisations play crucial roles in making security visible and understandable. Consumer Reports' privacy and security ratings influence purchase decisions and manufacturer behaviour. Research institutions publishing vulnerability discoveries push companies to remediate problems. Investigative journalists exposing data practices create accountability through public scrutiny.

Collective action through consumer rights organisations, class action litigation, and advocacy campaigns can achieve what individual purchasing decisions cannot. Ring's £5.6 million in customer refunds resulted from FTC enforcement supported by privacy advocates documenting problems over time. European data protection authorities' enforcement of GDPR against AI companies establishes precedents protecting consumers across member states.

Looking Ahead

The trajectory of AI consumer device security depends on technical evolution, regulatory development, and market dynamics that will shape options available to future consumers.

Edge AI processing continues advancing, enabling more sophisticated local computation without cloud dependence. Apple's Neural Engine and Google's Tensor chips demonstrate the feasibility of powerful on-device AI in consumer products. As this capability proliferates into smart home devices, it enables privacy-preserving functionality whilst reducing internet bandwidth and latency. Federated learning allows AI models to improve without centralising training data, addressing the tension between model performance and data minimisation.

Regulatory developments across major markets will establish floors for acceptable security practices. The EU's Cyber Resilience Act applies in 2027, creating comprehensive requirements for products with digital elements throughout their lifecycles. The UK's PSTI Regulations already establish minimum standards, with potential future expansions addressing gaps. The US Cyber Trust Mark programme's success depends on consumer awareness and manufacturer adoption, outcomes that will become clearer in 2025 and 2026.

International standards harmonisation could reduce compliance complexity whilst raising global baselines. NIST's IoT security guidance influences standards bodies worldwide. ETSI EN 303 645 is referenced in multiple regulatory frameworks. If major markets align requirements around common technical standards, manufacturers can build security into products once rather than adapting for different jurisdictions.

Consumer awareness and demand for security remains the crucial variable. If consumers prioritise security alongside features and price, manufacturers respond by improving products and marketing security capabilities. The Deloitte finding that consumers trusting providers spent 50% more on connected devices suggests economic incentives exist for manufacturers who earn trust through demonstrated security and privacy practices.

Security as Shared Responsibility

Evaluating security risks of AI-powered consumer products requires technical knowledge most consumers lack, time most can't spare, and access to information manufacturers often don't provide. The solutions outlined here impose costs on individuals trying to protect themselves whilst structural problems persist.

This isn't sustainable. Meaningful security for AI consumer devices requires manufacturers to build secure products, regulators to establish and enforce meaningful standards, and market mechanisms to reward security rather than treat it as cost to minimise. Individual consumers can and should take protective steps, but these actions supplement rather than substitute for systemic changes.

The Ring employees who accessed customers' bedroom camera footage, the Verkada breach exposing psychiatric patients, the Ecovacs vacuums collecting audio and photos without clear consent, and the myriad other incidents documented in FTC enforcement actions reveal fundamental problems in how AI consumer devices are designed, marketed, and supported. These aren't isolated failures or rare edge cases. They represent predictable outcomes when security and privacy are subordinated to rapid product development and data-hungry business models.

Before AI-powered devices enter your home, manufacturers should demonstrate: security-by-design throughout development; meaningful transparency about data collection and usage; regular independent security audits with public results; clear vulnerability disclosure processes and bug bounty programmes; incident response capabilities and breach notification procedures; defined product support lifecycles with end-of-life planning; data minimisation and federated learning where possible; and human oversight of consequential automated decisions.

These aren't unreasonable requirements. They're baseline expectations for products with cameras watching your children, microphones listening to conversations, and processors learning your routines. The standards emerging through legislation like PSTI and the Cyber Resilience Act, voluntary programmes like the Cyber Trust Mark, and enforcement actions by the FTC begin establishing these expectations as legal and market requirements rather than aspirational goals.

As consumers, we evaluate security risks using available information whilst pushing for better. We enable MFA, segment networks, change default passwords, and research products before purchase. We support regulations establishing minimum standards and enforcement actions holding manufacturers accountable. We choose products from manufacturers demonstrating commitment to security through past actions, not just marketing claims.

But fundamentally, we should demand that AI consumer devices be secure by default, not through expert-level configuration by individual consumers. The smart home shouldn't require becoming a cybersecurity specialist to safely inhabit. Until manufacturers meet that standard, the devices promising to simplify our lives simultaneously require constant vigilance to prevent them from compromising our security, privacy, and safety.


Sources and References

Federal Trade Commission. (2023). “FTC Says Ring Employees Illegally Surveilled Customers, Failed to Stop Hackers from Taking Control of Users' Cameras.” Retrieved from ftc.gov

Federal Trade Commission. (2024). “FTC Takes Action Against Security Camera Firm Verkada over Charges it Failed to Secure Videos, Other Personal Data and Violated CAN-SPAM Act.” Retrieved from ftc.gov

Federal Trade Commission. (2024). “FTC Takes Action Against IntelliVision Technologies for Deceptive Claims About its Facial Recognition Software.” Retrieved from ftc.gov

SonicWall. (2024). “Cyber Threat Report 2024.” Retrieved from sonicwall.com

Deloitte. (2024). “2024 Connected Consumer Survey: Increasing Consumer Privacy and Security Concerns in the Generative Age.” Retrieved from deloitte.com

Pew Research Center. “Consumer Perspectives of Privacy and Artificial Intelligence.” Retrieved from pewresearch.org

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. (2024). “GPT-4 Can Exploit Real-Life Security Flaws.” Retrieved from illinois.edu

Google Threat Intelligence Group. (2024). “Adversarial Misuse of Generative AI.” Retrieved from cloud.google.com

National Institute of Standards and Technology. “NIST Cybersecurity for IoT Program.” Retrieved from nist.gov

National Institute of Standards and Technology. “NISTIR 8259A: IoT Device Cybersecurity Capability Core Baseline.” Retrieved from nist.gov

National Institute of Standards and Technology. “Profile of the IoT Core Baseline for Consumer IoT Products (NIST IR 8425).” Retrieved from nist.gov

UK Government. (2023). “The Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure (Security Requirements for Relevant Connectable Products) Regulations 2023.” Retrieved from legislation.gov.uk

European Union. “Radio Equipment Directive (RED) Cybersecurity Requirements.” Retrieved from ec.europa.eu

European Parliament. (2024). “Cyber Resilience Act.” Retrieved from europarl.europa.eu

Federal Communications Commission. (2024). “U.S. Cyber Trust Mark.” Retrieved from fcc.gov

Connectivity Standards Alliance. “Matter Standard Specifications.” Retrieved from csa-iot.org

Consumer Reports. “Ring Expands End-to-End Encryption to More Cameras, Doorbells, and Users.” Retrieved from consumerreports.org

Consumer Reports. “Is Your Robotic Vacuum Sharing Data About You?” Retrieved from consumerreports.org

Tenable Research. (2025). “The Trifecta: How Three New Gemini Vulnerabilities Allowed Private Data Exfiltration.” Retrieved from tenable.com

NC State News. (2025). “Hardware Vulnerability Allows Attackers to Hack AI Training Data (GATEBLEED).” Retrieved from news.ncsu.edu

DEF CON. (2024). “Ecovacs Deebot Security Research Presentation.” Retrieved from defcon.org

MIT Technology Review. (2022). “A Roomba Recorded a Woman on the Toilet. How Did Screenshots End Up on Facebook?” Retrieved from technologyreview.com

Ubuntu. “Consumer IoT Device Update Survey.” Retrieved from ubuntu.com


Tim Green

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Discuss...

When Guido Girardi put on an Emotiv headset to test the latest consumer brain-reading gadget, he probably didn't expect to make legal history. The former Chilean senator was simply curious about a device that promised to track his focus and mental state through electroencephalography (EEG) sensors. What happened next would set a precedent that reverberates through the entire neurotechnology industry.

In August 2023, Chile's Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling ordering the San Francisco-based company to delete Girardi's brain data. The court found that Emotiv had violated his constitutional rights to physical and psychological integrity, as well as his right to privacy, by retaining his neural data for research purposes without proper consent. It was the world's first known court ruling on the use of “neurodata”, and it arrived at precisely the moment when brain-reading technology is transitioning from science fiction to everyday reality.

The timing couldn't be more critical. We're witnessing an unprecedented convergence: brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that were once confined to research laboratories are now being implanted into human skulls, whilst consumer-grade EEG headsets are appearing on shop shelves next to smartwatches and fitness trackers. The global electroencephalography devices market is projected to reach £3.65 billion by 2034, up from £1.38 billion in 2024. More specifically, the wearable EEG devices market alone is expected to hit £695.51 million by 2031.

This isn't some distant future scenario. In January 2024, Neuralink conducted its first human brain-chip implant. By January 2025, a third person had received the device. Three people are now using Neuralink's N1 chip daily to play video games, browse the web, and control external hardware. Meanwhile, competitors are racing ahead: Synchron, backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, has already implanted its device in 10 people. Precision Neuroscience, co-founded by a Neuralink defector, received FDA clearance in 2025 for its ultra-thin Layer 7 Cortical Interface, which packs 1,024 electrodes onto a strip thinner than a strand of human hair.

But here's what should genuinely concern you: whilst invasive BCIs grab headlines, it's the consumer devices that are quietly colonising the final frontier of privacy, your inner mental landscape. Companies like Emotiv, Muse (InteraXon), NeuroSky, and Neuphony are selling EEG headsets to anyone with a few hundred pounds and a curiosity about their brain activity. These devices promise to improve your meditation, optimise your sleep, boost your productivity, and enhance your gaming experience. What they don't always make clear is what happens to the extraordinarily intimate data they're collecting from your skull.

The Last Frontier Falls

Your brain generates approximately 50,000 thoughts per day, each one leaving electrical traces that can be detected, measured, and increasingly, decoded. This is the promise and the peril of neurotechnology.

“Neural data is uniquely sensitive due to its most intimate nature,” explains research published in the journal Frontiers in Digital Health. Unlike your browsing history or even your genetic code, brain data can reveal “mental health conditions, emotional states, and cognitive patterns, even when anonymised.” As US Senators noted in an April 2025 letter urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate neural data privacy, “Unlike other personal data, neural data, captured directly from the human brain, can reveal mental health conditions, emotional states, and cognitive patterns, even when anonymised.”

The technology for extracting this information is advancing at a startling pace. Scientists have developed brain-computer interfaces that can translate neural signals into intended movements, emotions, facial gestures, and speech. High-resolution brain imaging enables effective decoding of emotions, language, mental imagery, and psychological intent. Even non-invasive consumer devices measuring brain signals at the scalp can infer inner language, attention, emotion, sexual orientation, and arousal, among other cognitive functions.

Nita Farahany, the Robinson O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law and Philosophy at Duke University and one of the world's foremost experts on neurotechnology ethics, has been sounding the alarm for years. In her book “The Battle for Your Brain”, she argues that we're at a pivotal moment where neurotechnology could “supercharge data tracking and infringe on our mental privacy.” Farahany defines cognitive liberty as “the right to self-determination over our brains and mental experiences, as a right to both access and use technologies, but also a right to be free from interference with our mental privacy and freedom of thought.”

The concern isn't hypothetical. In April 2024, the Neurorights Foundation released a damning report examining the privacy practices of 30 consumer neurotechnology companies. The findings were alarming: 29 of the 30 companies reviewed “appeared to have access to the consumer's neural data and provide no meaningful limitations to this access.” In other words, nearly every company in the consumer neurotechnology space can peer into your brain activity without meaningful constraints.

The Workplace Panopticon Gets Neural

If the thought of tech companies accessing your neural data sounds dystopian, consider what's already happening in workplaces around the globe. Brain surveillance has moved from speculative fiction to operational reality, and it's expanding faster than most people realise.

Workers in offices, factories, farms, and airports are already wearing neural monitoring devices. Companies are using fatigue-tracking headbands with EEG sensors to monitor employees' brain activity and alert them when they become dangerously drowsy. In mining operations, finance firms, and sports organisations, neural sensors extract what their manufacturers call “productivity-enhancing data” from workers' brains.

The technologies involved are increasingly sophisticated. Electroencephalography (EEG) measures changes in electrical activity using electrodes attached to the scalp. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) measures changes in metabolic activity by passing infrared light through the skull to monitor blood flow. Both technologies are now reliable and affordable enough to support commercial deployment at scale.

With these devices, employers can analyse brain data to assess cognitive functions, detect cognitive patterns, and even identify neuropathologies. The data could inform decisions about promotions, hiring, or dismissal. The United Kingdom's Information Commissioner's Office predicts neurotechnology will be common in workplaces by the end of the decade.

The privacy implications are staggering. When individuals know their brain activity is being monitored, they may feel pressured to self-censor or modify their behaviour to align with perceived expectations. This creates a chilling effect on mental freedom. Employers could diagnose brain-related diseases, potentially leading to medical treatment but also discrimination. They could gather insights about how individual workers respond to different situations, information that could adversely affect employment or insurance status.

Perhaps most troublingly, there's reason to suspect that brain activity data wouldn't be covered by health privacy regulations like HIPAA in the United States, because it isn't always considered medical or health data. The regulatory gaps are vast, and employers are stepping into them with minimal oversight or accountability.

The Regulatory Awakening

For years, the law lagged hopelessly behind neurotechnology. That's finally beginning to change, though whether the pace of regulation can match the speed of technological advancement remains an open question.

Chile blazed the trail. In 2021, it became the first country in the world to amend its constitution to explicitly protect “neurorights”, enshrining the mental privacy and integrity of individuals as fundamental rights. The constitution now protects “cerebral activity and the information drawn from it” as a constitutional right. The 2023 Supreme Court ruling against Emotiv put teeth into that constitutional protection, ordering the company to delete Girardi's data and mandating strict assessments of its products prior to commercialisation in Chile.

In the United States, change is happening at the state level. In 2024, Colorado and California enacted the first state privacy laws governing neural data. Colorado's House Bill 24-1058 requires regulated businesses to obtain opt-in consent to collect and use neural data, whilst California's Consumer Privacy Act only affords consumers a limited right to opt out of the use and disclosure of their neural data. The difference is significant: opt-in consent requires active agreement before data collection begins, whilst opt-out allows companies to collect by default unless users take action to stop them.

Montana followed suit, and at least six other states are developing similar legislation. Some proposals include workplace protections with bans or strict limits on using neural data for surveillance or decision-making in employment contexts, special protections for minors, and prohibitions on mind manipulation or interference with decision-making.

The European Union, characteristically, is taking a comprehensive approach. Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), neural data often constitutes biometric data that can uniquely identify a natural person, or data concerning health. Both categories are classified as “special categories of data” subject to enhanced protection. Neural data “may provide deep insights into people's brain activity and reveal the most intimate personal thoughts and feelings”, making it particularly sensitive under EU law.

The Spanish supervisory authority (AEPD) and the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) recently released a joint report titled “TechDispatch on Neurodata” detailing neurotechnologies and their data protection implications. Data Protection Authorities across Europe have begun turning their focus to consumer devices that collect and process neural data, signalling that enforcement actions may be on the horizon.

Globally, UNESCO is preparing a landmark framework. In August 2024, UNESCO appointed an internal expert group to prepare a new global standard on the ethics of neurotechnology. The draft Recommendation on the Ethics of Neurotechnology will be submitted for adoption by UNESCO's 194 Member States in November 2025, following two years of global consultations and intergovernmental negotiations.

The framework addresses critical issues including mental privacy and cognitive liberty, noting that neurotechnology can “directly access, manipulate and emulate the structure of the brain, producing information about identities, emotions, and fears, which combined with AI can threaten human identity, dignity, freedom of thought, autonomy, and mental privacy.”

The Neurorights We Need

Legal frameworks are emerging, but what specific rights should you have over your neural data? Researchers and advocates have coalesced around several foundational principles.

Rafael Yuste, a neurobiologist at Columbia University who helped initiate the BRAIN Initiative and co-founded the Neurorights Foundation, has proposed five core neurorights: mental privacy, mental identity, free will, fair access to mental augmentation, and protection from bias.

Mental privacy, the most fundamental of these rights, protects private or sensitive information in a person's mind from unauthorised collection, storage, use, or deletion. This goes beyond traditional data privacy. Your neural activity isn't just information you've chosen to share; it's the involuntary electrical signature of your inner life. Every thought, every emotion, every mental process leaves traces that technology can increasingly intercept.

Mental identity addresses concerns about neurotechnology potentially altering who we are. As BCIs become capable of modifying brain function, not just reading it, questions arise about the boundaries of self. If a device can change your emotional states, enhance your cognitive capabilities, or suppress unwanted thoughts, at what point does it begin to redefine your identity? This isn't abstract philosophy; it's a practical concern as neurotechnology moves from observation to intervention.

Free will speaks to the integrity of decision-making. Neurotechnology that can influence your thoughts or emotional states raises profound questions about autonomy. The EU's AI Act already classifies AI-based neurotechnology that uses “significantly harmful subliminal manipulation” as prohibited, recognising this threat to human agency.

Fair access to mental augmentation addresses equity concerns. If BCIs can genuinely enhance cognitive abilities, memory, or learning, access to these technologies could create new forms of inequality. Without safeguards, we could see the emergence of a “neuro-divide” between those who can afford cognitive enhancement and those who cannot, exacerbating existing social disparities.

Protection from bias ensures that neural data isn't used to discriminate. Given that brain data can potentially reveal information about mental health conditions, cognitive patterns, and other sensitive characteristics, strong anti-discrimination protections are essential.

Beyond these five principles, several additional rights deserve consideration:

The right to cognitive liberty: This encompasses both the positive right to access and use neurotechnology and the negative right to be free from forced or coerced use of such technology. You should have the fundamental freedom to decide whether and how to interface your brain with external devices.

The right to neural data ownership: Your brain activity is fundamentally different from your web browsing history. You should have inalienable ownership of your neural data, with the right to access, control, delete, and potentially monetise it. Current laws often treat neural data as something companies can collect and “own” if you agree to their terms of service, but this framework is inadequate for such intimate information.

The right to real-time transparency: You should have the right to know, in real-time, when your neural data is being collected, what specific information is being extracted, and for what purposes. Unlike traditional data collection, where you might review a privacy policy before signing up for a service, neural data collection can be continuous and involuntary.

The right to meaningful consent: Standard “click to agree” consent mechanisms are inadequate for neural data. Given the sensitivity and involuntary nature of brain activity, consent should be specific, informed, granular, and revocable. You should be able to consent to some uses of your neural data whilst refusing others, and you should be able to withdraw that consent at any time.

The right to algorithmic transparency: When AI systems process your neural data to infer your emotional states, intentions, or cognitive patterns, you have a right to understand how those inferences are made. The algorithms analysing your brain shouldn't be black boxes. You should know what signals they're looking for, what conclusions they're drawing, and how accurate those conclusions are.

The right to freedom from neural surveillance: Particularly in workplace contexts, there should be strict limits on when and how employers can monitor brain activity. Some advocates argue for outright bans on workplace neural surveillance except in narrowly defined safety-critical contexts with explicit worker consent and independent oversight.

The right to secure neural data: Brain data should be subject to the highest security standards, including encryption both in transit and at rest, strict access controls with multi-factor authentication and role-based access, secure key management, and regular security audits. The consequences of a neural data breach could be catastrophic, revealing intimate information that can never be made private again.

Technical Safeguards for Mental Privacy

Rights are meaningless without enforcement mechanisms and technical safeguards. Researchers are developing innovative approaches to protect mental privacy whilst preserving the benefits of neurotechnology.

Scientists working on speech BCIs have explored strategies to prevent devices from transmitting unintended thoughts. These include preventing neural data associated with inner speech from being transmitted to algorithms, and setting special keywords that users can think to activate the device. The idea is to create a “neural firewall” that blocks involuntary mental chatter whilst only transmitting data you consciously intend to share.

Encryption plays a crucial role. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithms can protect brain data both at rest and in transit. Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols ensure data remains confidential during transmission from device to server. But encryption alone isn't sufficient; secure key management is equally critical. Compromised encryption keys leave all encrypted neural data vulnerable. This requires robust key generation, secure storage (ideally using hardware security modules), regular rotation, and strict access controls.

Anonymisation and pseudonymisation techniques can help, though they're not panaceas. Neural data is so unique that it may function as a biometric identifier, potentially allowing re-identification even when processed.

The Chilean Supreme Court recognised this concern, finding that Emotiv's retention of Girardi's data “even in anonymised form” without consent for research purposes violated his rights. This judicial precedent suggests that traditional anonymisation approaches may be insufficient for neural data.

Federated learning keeps raw neural data on local devices. Instead of sending brain signals to centralised servers, algorithms train on data that remains local, with only aggregated insights shared. This preserves privacy whilst still enabling beneficial applications like improved BCI performance or medical research. The technique is already used in some smartphone applications and could be adapted for neurotechnology.

Differential privacy protects individual privacy whilst maintaining statistical utility. Mathematical noise added to datasets prevents individual identification whilst preserving research value. Applied to neural data, this technique could allow researchers to study patterns across populations without exposing any individual's brain activity. The technique provides formal privacy guarantees, making it possible to quantify exactly how much privacy protection is being provided.

Some researchers advocate for data minimisation: collect only the neural data necessary for a specific purpose, retain it no longer than needed, and delete it securely when it's no longer required. This principle stands in stark contrast to the commercial norm of speculative data hoarding. Data minimisation requires companies to think carefully about what they actually need before collection begins.

Technical standards are emerging. The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) has developed working groups focused on neurotechnology standards. Industry consortia are exploring best practices for neural data governance. Yet these efforts remain fragmented, with voluntary adoption. Regulatory agencies must enforce standards to ensure widespread implementation.

Re-imagining the Relationship with Tech Companies

The current relationship between users and technology companies is fundamentally broken when it comes to neural data. You click “I agree” to a 10,000-word privacy policy you haven't read, and suddenly a company claims the right to collect, analyse, store, and potentially sell information about your brain activity. This model, already problematic for conventional data, becomes unconscionable for neural data. A new framework is needed, one that recognises the unique status of brain data and shifts power back towards individuals:

Fiduciary duties for neural data: Tech companies that collect neural data should be legally recognised as fiduciaries, owing duties of loyalty and care to users. This means they would be required to act in users' best interests, not merely avoid explicitly prohibited conduct. A fiduciary framework would prohibit using neural data in ways that harm users, even if technically permitted by a privacy policy.

Mandatory neural data impact assessments: Before deploying neurotechnology products, companies should be required to conduct and publish thorough assessments of potential privacy, security, and human rights impacts. These assessments should be reviewed by independent experts and regulatory bodies, not just internal legal teams.

Radical transparency requirements: Companies should provide clear, accessible, real-time information about what neural data they're collecting, how they're processing it, what inferences they're drawing, and with whom they're sharing it. This information should be available through intuitive interfaces, not buried in privacy policies.

Data portability and interoperability: You should be able to move your neural data between services and platforms. If you're using a meditation app that collects EEG data, you should be able to export that data and use it with a different service if you choose. This prevents lock-in and promotes competition.

Prohibition on secondary uses: Unless you provide specific, informed consent, companies should be prohibited from using neural data for purposes beyond the primary function you signed up for. If you buy an EEG headset to improve your meditation, the company shouldn't be allowed to sell insights about your emotional states to advertisers or share your data with insurance companies.

Liability for neural data breaches: Companies that suffer neural data breaches should face strict liability, not merely regulatory fines. Individuals whose brain data is compromised should have clear paths for compensation. The stakes are too high for the current system where companies internalise profits whilst externalising the costs of inadequate security.

Ban on neural data discrimination: It should be illegal to discriminate based on neural data in contexts like employment, insurance, education, or credit. Just as genetic non-discrimination laws protect people from being penalised for their DNA, neural non-discrimination laws should protect people from being penalised for their brain activity patterns.

Mandatory deletion timelines: Neural data should be subject to strict retention limits. Except in specific circumstances with explicit consent, companies should be required to delete neural data after defined periods, perhaps 90 days for consumer applications and longer for medical research with proper ethical oversight.

Independent oversight: An independent regulatory body should oversee the neurotechnology industry, with powers to audit companies, investigate complaints, impose meaningful penalties, and revoke authorisation to collect neural data for serious violations. Self-regulation has demonstrably failed.

The Neurorights Foundation's 2024 report demonstrated the inadequacy of current practices. When 29 out of 30 companies provide no meaningful limitations on their access to neural data, the problem is systemic, not limited to a few bad actors.

The Commercial Imperative Meets the Mental Fortress

The tension between commercial interests and mental privacy is already generating friction, and it's only going to intensify.

Technology companies have invested billions in neurotechnology. Facebook (now Meta) has poured hundreds of millions into BCI technology, primarily aimed at consumers operating personal and entertainment-oriented digital devices with their minds. Neuralink has raised over £1 billion, including a £650 million Series E round in June 2025. The global market for neurotech is expected to reach £21 billion by 2026.

These companies see enormous commercial potential: new advertising channels based on attention and emotional state, productivity tools that optimise cognitive performance, entertainment experiences that respond to mental states, healthcare applications that diagnose and treat neurological conditions, educational tools that adapt to learning patterns in real-time.

Some applications could be genuinely beneficial. BCIs offer hope for people with paralysis, locked-in syndrome, or severe communication disabilities. Consumer EEG devices might help people manage stress, improve focus, or optimise sleep. The technology itself isn't inherently good or evil; it's a tool whose impact depends on how it's developed, deployed, and regulated.

But history offers a cautionary tale. With every previous wave of technology, from social media to smartphones to wearables, we've seen initial promises of empowerment give way to extractive business models built on data collection and behavioural manipulation. We told ourselves that targeted advertising was a small price to pay for free services. We accepted that our locations, contacts, messages, photos, and browsing histories would be harvested and monetised. We normalised surveillance capitalism.

With neurotechnology, we face a choice: repeat the same pattern with our most intimate data, or establish a different relationship from the start.

There are signs of resistance. The Chilean Supreme Court decision demonstrated that courts can protect neural privacy even against powerful international corporations. The wave of state legislation in the US shows that policymakers are beginning to recognise the unique concerns around brain data. UNESCO's upcoming global framework could establish international norms that shape the industry's development.

Consumer awareness is growing too. When the Neurorights Foundation published its findings about industry privacy practices, it sparked conversations in mainstream media. Researchers like Nita Farahany are effectively communicating the stakes to general audiences. Advocacy organisations are pushing for stronger protections.

But awareness and advocacy aren't enough. Without enforceable rights, technical safeguards, and regulatory oversight, neurotechnology will follow the same path as previous technologies, with companies racing to extract maximum value from our neural data whilst minimising their obligations to protect it.

What Happens When Thoughts Aren't Private

To understand what's at risk, consider what becomes possible when thoughts are no longer private.

Authoritarian governments could use neurotechnology to detect dissent before it's expressed, monitoring citizens for “thought crimes” that were once confined to dystopian fiction. Employers could screen job candidates based on their unconscious biases or perceived loyalty, detected through neural responses. Insurance companies could adjust premiums based on brain activity patterns that suggest health risks or behavioural tendencies.

Marketing could become frighteningly effective, targeting you not based on what you've clicked or purchased, but based on your brain's involuntary responses to stimuli. You might see an advertisement and think you're unmoved, but neural data could reveal that your brain is highly engaged, leading to persistent retargeting.

Education could be warped by neural optimisation, with students pressured to use cognitive enhancement technology to compete, creating a race to the bottom where “natural” cognitive ability is stigmatised. Relationships could be complicated by neural compatibility testing, reducing human connection to optimised brain-pattern matching.

Legal systems would face novel challenges. Could neural data be subpoenaed in court cases? If BCIs can detect when someone is thinking about committing a crime, should that be admissible evidence? What happens to the presumption of innocence when your brain activity can be monitored for deceptive patterns?

These scenarios might sound far-fetched, but remember: a decade ago, the idea that we'd voluntarily carry devices that track our every movement, monitor our health in real-time, listen to our conversations, and serve as portals for constant surveillance seemed dystopian. Now, we call those devices smartphones and most of us can't imagine life without them.

The difference with neurotechnology is that brains, unlike phones, can't be left at home. Your neural activity is continuous and involuntary. You can't opt out of having thoughts. If we allow neurotechnology to develop without robust privacy protections, we're not just surrendering another category of data. We're surrendering the last space where we could be truly private, even from ourselves.

The Path Forward

So what should be done? The challenges are complex, but the direction is clear.

First, we need comprehensive legal frameworks that recognise cognitive liberty as a fundamental human right. Chile has shown it's possible. UNESCO's November 2025 framework could establish global norms. Individual nations and regions need to follow with enforceable legislation that goes beyond retrofitting existing privacy laws to explicitly address the unique concerns of neural data.

Second, we need technical standards and security requirements specific to neurotechnology. The IEEE and other standards bodies should accelerate their work, and regulatory agencies should mandate compliance with emerging best practices. Neural data encryption should be mandatory, not optional. Security audits should be regular and rigorous.

Third, we need to shift liability. Companies collecting neural data should bear the burden of protecting it, with severe consequences for failures. The current model, where companies profit from data collection whilst users bear the risks of breaches and misuse, is backwards.

Fourth, we need independent oversight with real teeth. Regulatory agencies need adequate funding, technical expertise, and enforcement powers to meaningfully govern the neurotechnology industry. Self-regulation and voluntary guidelines have proven insufficient.

Fifth, we need public education. Most people don't yet understand what neurotechnology can do, what data it collects, or what the implications are. Researchers, journalists, and educators need to make these issues accessible and urgent.

Sixth, we need to support ethical innovation. Not all neurotechnology development is problematic. Medical applications that help people with disabilities, research that advances our understanding of the brain, and consumer applications built with privacy-by-design principles should be encouraged. The goal isn't to halt progress; it's to ensure progress serves human flourishing rather than just commercial extraction.

Seventh, we need international cooperation. Neural data doesn't respect borders. A company operating in a jurisdiction with weak protections can still collect data from users worldwide. UNESCO's framework is a start, but we need binding international agreements with enforcement mechanisms.

Finally, we need to think carefully about what we're willing to trade. Every technology involves trade-offs. The question is whether we make those choices consciously and collectively, or whether we sleepwalk into a future where mental privacy is a quaint relic of a less connected age.

The Stakes

In 2023, when the Chilean Supreme Court ordered Emotiv to delete Guido Girardi's neural data, it wasn't just vindicating one individual's rights. It was asserting a principle: your brain activity belongs to you, not to the companies that devise clever ways to measure it.

That principle is now being tested globally. As BCIs transition from experimental to commercial, as EEG headsets become as common as smartwatches, as workplace neural monitoring expands, as AI systems become ever more adept at inferring your mental states from your brain activity, we're approaching an inflection point.

The technology exists to peer into your mind in ways that would have seemed impossible a generation ago. The commercial incentives to exploit that capability are enormous. The regulatory frameworks to constrain it are nascent and fragmented. The public awareness needed to demand protection is only beginning to develop.

This is the moment to establish the rights, rules, and norms that will govern neurotechnology for decades to come. Get it right, and we might see beneficial applications that improve lives whilst respecting cognitive liberty. Get it wrong, and we'll look back on current privacy concerns, data breaches, and digital surveillance as quaint compared to what happens when the final frontier, the private space inside our skulls, falls to commercial and governmental intrusion.

Rafael Yuste, the neuroscientist and neurorights advocate, has warned: “Let's act before it's too late.” The window for proactive protection is still open, but it's closing fast. The companies investing billions in neurotechnology aren't waiting for permission. The algorithms learning to decode brain activity aren't pausing for ethical reflection. The devices spreading into workplaces, homes, and schools aren't holding themselves back until regulations catch up.

Your brain generates those 50,000 thoughts per day whether or not you want it to. The question is: who gets to know what those thoughts are? Who gets to store that information? Who gets to analyse it, sell it, or use it to make decisions about your life? And crucially, who gets to decide?

The answer to that last question should be you. But making that answer a reality will require recognising cognitive liberty as a fundamental right, enshrining robust legal protections, demanding technical safeguards, holding companies accountable, and insisting that the most intimate space in existence, the interior landscape of your mind, remains yours.

The battle for your brain has begun. The outcome is far from certain. But one thing is clear: the time to fight for mental privacy isn't when the technology is fully deployed and the business models are entrenched. It's now, whilst we still have the chance to choose a different path.


Sources and References

  1. Frontiers in Digital Health (2025). “Regulating neural data processing in the age of BCIs: Ethical concerns and legal approaches.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11951885/

  2. U.S. Senators letter to Federal Trade Commission (April 2025). https://www.medtechdive.com/news/senators-bci-brain-computer-privacy-ftc/746733/

  3. Grand View Research (2024). “Wearable EEG Headsets Market Size & Share Report, 2030.”

  4. Arnold & Porter (2025). “Neural Data Privacy Regulation: What Laws Exist and What Is Anticipated?”

  5. Frontiers in Psychology (2024). “Chilean Supreme Court ruling on the protection of brain activity: neurorights, personal data protection, and neurodata.” https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1330439/full

  6. National Center for Biotechnology Information (2023). “Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5447561/

  7. MIT Technology Review (2024). “A new law in California protects consumers' brain data. Some think it doesn't go far enough.”

  8. KFF Health News (2024). “States Pass Privacy Laws To Protect Brain Data Collected by Devices.”

  9. Neurorights Foundation (April 2024). “Safeguarding Brain Data: Assessing the Privacy Practices.” https://perseus-strategies.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/FINAL_Consumer_Neurotechnology_Report_Neurorights_Foundation_April-1.pdf

  10. Frontiers in Human Dynamics (2023). “Neurosurveillance in the workplace: do employers have the right to monitor employees' minds?” https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-dynamics/articles/10.3389/fhumd.2023.1245619/full

  11. IEEE Spectrum (2024). “Are You Ready for Workplace Brain Scanning?”

  12. The Conversation (2024). “Brain monitoring may be the future of work.”

  13. Harvard Business Review (2023). “Neurotech at Work.”

  14. Spanish Data Protection Authority (AEPD) and European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) (2024). “TechDispatch on Neurodata.”

  15. European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Biometric data classification provisions.

  16. UNESCO (2024). “The Ethics of Neurotechnology: UNESCO appoints international expert group to prepare a new global standard.” https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/ethics-neurotechnology-unesco-appoints-international-expert-group-prepare-new-global-standard

  17. UNESCO (2025). Draft Recommendation on the Ethics of Neurotechnology (pending adoption November 2025).

  18. Columbia University News (2024). “New Report Promotes Innovation and Protects Human Rights in Neurotechnology.” https://news.columbia.edu/news/new-report-promotes-innovation-and-protects-human-rights-neurotechnology

  19. Duke University. Nita A. Farahany professional profile and research on cognitive liberty.

  20. Farahany, Nita A. (2023). “The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology.” St. Martin's Press.

  21. NPR (2025). “Nita Farahany on neurotech and the future of your mental privacy.”

  22. CNBC (2024). “Neuralink competitor Precision Neuroscience testing human brain implant.” https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/25/neuralink-competitor-precision-neuroscience-is-testing-its-brain-implant-in-humans.html

  23. IEEE Spectrum (2024). “The Brain-Implant Company Going for Neuralink's Jugular.” Profile of Synchron.

  24. MIT Technology Review (2024). “You've heard of Neuralink. Meet the other companies developing brain-computer interfaces.”

  25. Colorado House Bill 24-1058 (2024). Neural data privacy legislation.

  26. California Senate Bill 1223 (2024). California Consumer Privacy Act amendments for neural data.

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  28. Oxford Academic (2024). “Addressing privacy risk in neuroscience data: from data protection to harm prevention.” Journal of Law and the Biosciences.

  29. World Health Organization. Epilepsy statistics and neurological disorder prevalence data.

  30. Emotiv Systems. Company information and product specifications. https://www.emotiv.com/

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  32. NeuroSky. Biosensor technology specifications.

  33. Neuphony. Wearable EEG headset technology information.

  34. ResearchGate (2024). “Brain Data Security and Neurosecurity: Technological advances, Ethical dilemmas, and Philosophical perspectives.”

  35. Number Analytics (2024). “Safeguarding Neural Data in Neurotech.” Privacy and security guide.


Tim Green

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Discuss...

Forty per cent of American workers encountered it last month. Each instance wasted nearly two hours of productive time. For organisations with 10,000 employees, the annual cost reaches $9 million. Yet most people didn't have a name for it until September 2024, when researchers at Stanford Social Media Lab and BetterUp coined a term for the phenomenon flooding modern workplaces: workslop.

The definition is deceptively simple. Workslop is AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task. It's the memo that reads beautifully but says nothing. The report packed with impressive charts presenting fabricated statistics. The code that looks functional but contains subtle logical errors. Long, fancy-sounding language wrapped around an empty core, incomplete information dressed in sophisticated formatting, communication without actual information transfer.

Welcome to the paradox of 2025, where artificial intelligence has become simultaneously more sophisticated and more superficial, flooding workplaces, classrooms, and publishing platforms with content that looks brilliant but delivers nothing. The phenomenon is fundamentally changing how we evaluate quality itself, decoupling the traditional markers of credibility from the substance they once reliably indicated.

The Anatomy of Nothing

To understand workslop, you first need to understand how fundamentally different it is from traditional poor-quality work. When humans produce bad work, it typically fails in obvious ways: unclear thinking, grammatical errors, logical gaps. Workslop is different. It's polished to perfection, grammatically flawless, and structurally sound. The problem isn't what it says, it's what it doesn't say.

The September 2024 Stanford-BetterUp study, which surveyed 1,150 full-time U.S. desk workers, revealed the staggering scale of this problem. Forty per cent of workers reported receiving workslop from colleagues in the past month. Each instance required an average of one hour and 56 minutes to resolve, creating what researchers calculate as a $186 monthly “invisible tax” per employee. Scaled across a 10,000-person organisation, that translates to approximately $9 million in lost productivity annually.

But the financial cost barely scratches the surface. The study found that 53 per cent of respondents felt “annoyed” upon receiving AI-generated work, whilst 22 per cent reported feeling “offended.” More damaging still, 54 per cent viewed their AI-using colleague as less creative, 42 per cent as less trustworthy, and 37 per cent as less intelligent. Workslop isn't just wasting time, it's corroding the social fabric of organisations.

The distribution patterns reveal uncomfortable truths about workplace hierarchies. Whilst 40 per cent of workslop comes from peers, 16 per cent flows down from management. About 18 per cent of respondents admitted sending workslop to managers, whilst 16 per cent reported receiving it from bosses. The phenomenon respects no organisational boundaries.

The content itself follows predictable patterns. Reports that summarise without analysing. Presentations with incomplete context. Emails strangely worded yet formally correct. Code implementations missing crucial details. It's the workplace equivalent of empty calories, filling space without nourishing understanding.

The Slop Spectrum

Workslop represents just one node in a broader constellation of AI-generated mediocrity that's rapidly colonising the internet. The broader phenomenon, simply called “slop,” encompasses low-quality media made with generative artificial intelligence across all domains. What unites these variations is an inherent lack of effort and an overwhelming volume that's transforming the digital landscape.

The statistics are staggering. After ChatGPT's release in November 2022, the proportion of text generated or modified by large language models skyrocketed. Corporate press releases jumped from around 2-3 per cent AI-generated content to approximately 24 per cent by late 2023. Gartner estimates that 90 per cent of internet content could be AI-generated by 2030, a projection that felt absurd when first published but now seems grimly plausible.

The real-world consequences have already manifested in disturbing ways. When Hurricane Helene devastated the Southeast United States in late September 2024, fake AI-generated images supposedly showing the storm's aftermath spread widely online. The flood of synthetic content created noise that actively hindered first responders, making it harder to identify genuine emergency situations amidst the slop. Information pollution had graduated from nuisance to active danger.

The publishing world offers another stark example. Clarkesworld, a respected online science fiction magazine that accepts user submissions and compensates contributors, stopped accepting new submissions in 2024. The reason? An overwhelming deluge of AI-generated stories that consumed editorial resources whilst offering nothing of literary value. A publication that had spent decades nurturing new voices was forced to close its doors because the signal-to-noise ratio had become untenable.

Perhaps most concerning is the feedback loop this creates for AI development itself. As AI-generated content floods the internet, it increasingly contaminates the training data for future models. The very slop current AI systems produce becomes fodder for the next generation, creating what researchers worry could be a degradation spiral. AI systems trained on the mediocre output of previous AI systems compound errors and limitations in ways we're only beginning to understand.

The Detection Dilemma

If workslop and slop are proliferating, why can't we just build better detection systems? The answer reveals uncomfortable truths about both human perception and AI capabilities.

Multiple detection tools have emerged, from OpenAI's classifier to specialised platforms like GPTZero, Writer, and Copyleaks. Yet research consistently demonstrates their limitations. AI detection tools showed higher accuracy identifying content from GPT-3.5 than GPT-4, and when applied to human-written control responses, they exhibited troubling inconsistencies, producing false positives and uncertain classifications. The best current systems claim 85-95 per cent accuracy, but that still means one in twenty judgements could be wrong, an error rate with serious consequences in academic or professional contexts.

Humans, meanwhile, fare even worse. Research shows people can distinguish AI-generated text only about 53 per cent of the time in controlled settings, barely better than random guessing. Both novice and experienced teachers proved unable to identify texts generated by ChatGPT among student-written submissions in a 2024 study. More problematically, teachers were overconfident in their judgements, certain they could spot AI work when they demonstrably could not. In a cruel twist, the same research found that AI-generated essays tended to receive higher grades than human-written work.

The technical reasons for this detection difficulty are illuminating. Current AI systems have learned to mimic the subtle imperfections that characterise human writing. Earlier models produced text that was suspiciously perfect, grammatically flawless in ways that felt mechanical. Modern systems have learned to introduce calculated imperfections, varying sentence structure, occasionally breaking grammatical rules for emphasis, even mimicking the rhythms of human thought. The result is content that passes the uncanny valley test, feeling human enough to evade both algorithmic and human detection.

This creates a profound epistemological crisis. If we cannot reliably distinguish human from machine output, and if machine output ranges from genuinely useful to elaborate nonsense, how do we evaluate quality? The traditional markers of credibility, polish, professionalism, formal correctness, have been decoupled from the substance they once reliably indicated.

The problem extends beyond simple identification. Even when we suspect content is AI-generated, assessing its actual utility requires domain expertise. A technically accurate-sounding medical summary might contain dangerous errors. A seemingly comprehensive market analysis could reference non-existent studies. Without deep knowledge in the relevant field, distinguishing plausible from accurate becomes nearly impossible.

The Hallucination Problem

Underlying the workslop phenomenon is a more fundamental issue: AI systems don't know what they don't know. The “hallucination” problem, where AI confidently generates false information, has intensified even as models have grown more sophisticated.

The statistics are sobering. OpenAI's latest reasoning systems show hallucination rates reaching 33 per cent for their o3 model and 48 per cent for o4-mini when answering questions about public figures. These advanced reasoning models, theoretically more reliable than standard large language models, actually hallucinate more frequently. Even Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash, currently the most reliable model available as of April 2025, still fabricates information 0.7 per cent of the time. Some models exceed 25 per cent hallucination rates.

The consequences extend far beyond statistical abstractions. In February 2025, Google's AI Overview cited an April Fool's satire about “microscopic bees powering computers” as factual in search results. Air Canada's chatbot provided misleading information about bereavement fares, resulting in financial loss when a customer acted on the incorrect advice. Most alarming was a 2024 Stanford University study finding that large language models collectively invented over 120 non-existent court cases, complete with convincingly realistic names and detailed but entirely fabricated legal reasoning.

This represents a qualitatively different form of misinformation than humanity has previously encountered. Traditional misinformation stems from human mistakes, bias, or intentional deception. AI hallucinations emerge from probabilistic systems with no understanding of accuracy and no intent to deceive. The AI isn't lying, it's confabulating, filling in gaps with plausible-sounding content because that's what its training optimised it to do. The result is confident, articulate nonsense that requires expertise to debunk.

The workslop phenomenon amplifies this problem by packaging hallucinations in professional formats. A memo might contain entirely fabricated statistics presented in impressive charts. A market analysis could reference non-existent studies. Code might implement algorithms that appear functional but contain subtle logical errors. The polish obscures the emptiness, and the volume makes thorough fact-checking impractical.

Interestingly, some mitigation techniques have shown promise. Google's 2025 research demonstrates that models with built-in reasoning capabilities reduce hallucinations by up to 65 per cent. December 2024 research found that simply asking an AI “Are you hallucinating right now?” reduced hallucination rates by 17 per cent in subsequent responses. Yet even with these improvements, the baseline problem remains: AI systems generate content based on statistical patterns, not verified knowledge.

The Productivity Paradox

Here's where the workslop crisis becomes genuinely confounding. The same AI tools creating these problems are also delivering remarkable productivity gains. Understanding this paradox is essential to grasping why workslop proliferates despite its costs.

The data on AI productivity benefits is impressive. Workers using generative AI achieved an average time savings of 5.4 per cent of work hours in November 2024. For someone working 40 hours weekly, that's 2.2 hours saved. Employees report an average productivity boost of 40 per cent when using AI tools. Studies show AI triples productivity on one-third of tasks, reducing a 90-minute task to 30 minutes. Customer service employees manage 13.8 per cent more inquiries per hour with AI assistance. Average workers write 59 per cent more documents using generative AI tools.

McKinsey sizes the long-term AI opportunity at $4.4 trillion in added productivity growth potential. Seventy-eight per cent of organisations now use AI in at least one business function, up from 55 per cent a year earlier. Sixty-five per cent regularly use generative AI, nearly double the percentage from just ten months prior. The average return on investment is 3.7 times the initial outlay.

So why the workslop problem? The answer lies in the gap between productivity gains and value creation. AI excels at generating output quickly. What it doesn't guarantee is that the output actually advances meaningful goals. An employee who produces 59 per cent more documents hasn't necessarily created 59 per cent more value if those documents lack substance. Faster isn't always better when speed comes at the cost of utility.

The workplace is bifurcating into two camps. Thoughtful AI users leverage tools to enhance genuine productivity, automating rote tasks whilst maintaining quality control. Careless users treat AI as a shortcut to avoid thinking altogether, generating impressive-looking deliverables that create downstream chaos. The latter group produces workslop; the former produces genuine efficiency gains.

The challenge for organisations is that both groups show similar surface-level productivity metrics. Both generate more output. Both hit deadlines faster. The difference emerges only downstream, when colleagues spend hours decoding workslop or when decisions based on flawed AI analysis fail spectacularly. By then, the productivity gains have been swamped by the remediation costs.

This productivity paradox explains why workslop persists despite mounting evidence of its costs. Individual workers see immediate benefits from AI assistance. The negative consequences are distributed, delayed, and harder to measure. It's a tragedy of the commons playing out in knowledge work, where personal productivity gains create collective inefficiency.

Industry Shockwaves

The workslop crisis is reshaping industries in unexpected ways, with each sector grappling with the tension between AI's productivity promise and its quality risks.

In journalism, the stakes are existentially high. Reuters Institute research across six countries found that whilst people believe AI will make news cheaper to produce and more up-to-date, they also expect it to make journalism less transparent and less trustworthy. The net sentiment scores reveal the depth of concern: whilst AI earns a +39 score for making news cheaper and +22 for timeliness, it receives -8 for transparency and -19 for trustworthiness. Views have hardened since 2024.

A July 2024 Brookings workshop identified threats including narrative homogenisation, accelerated misinformation spread, and increased newsroom dependence on technology companies. The fundamental problem is that AI-generated content directly contradicts journalism's core mission. As experts emphasised repeatedly in 2024 research, AI has the potential to misinform, falsely cite, and fabricate information. Whilst AI can streamline time-consuming tasks like transcription, keyword searching, and trend analysis, freeing journalists for investigation and narrative craft, any AI-generated content must be supervised. The moment that supervision lapses, credibility collapses.

Research by Shin (2021) found that readers tended to trust human-written news stories more, even though in blind tests they could not distinguish between AI and human-written content. This creates a paradox: people can't identify AI journalism but trust it less when they know of its existence. The implication is that transparency about AI use might undermine reader confidence, whilst concealing AI involvement risks catastrophic credibility loss if discovered.

Some outlets have found a productive balance, viewing AI as complement rather than substitute for journalistic expertise. But the economics are treacherous. If competitors are publishing AI-generated content at a fraction of the cost, the pressure to compromise editorial standards intensifies. The result could be a race to the bottom, where the cheapest, fastest content wins readership regardless of quality or accuracy.

Academia faces a parallel crisis, though the contours differ. Educational institutions initially responded to AI writing tools with detection software and honour code revisions. But as detection reliability has proven inadequate, a more fundamental reckoning has begun. If AI can generate essays indistinguishable from student work, what exactly are we assessing? If the goal is to evaluate writing ability, AI has made that nearly impossible. If the goal is to assess thinking and understanding, perhaps writing was never the ideal evaluation method anyway.

The implications extend beyond assessment. Both novice and experienced teachers in 2024 studies proved unable to identify AI-generated texts among student submissions, and both groups were overconfident in their abilities. The research revealed that AI-generated texts sometimes received higher grades than human work, suggesting that traditional rubrics may reward the surface polish AI excels at producing whilst missing the deeper understanding that distinguishes authentic learning.

The creative industries confront perhaps the deepest questions about authenticity and value. Over 80 per cent of creative professionals have integrated AI tools into their workflows, with U.S.-based creatives at an 87 per cent adoption rate. Twenty per cent of companies now require AI use in certain creative projects. Ninety-nine per cent of entertainment industry executives plan to implement generative AI within the next three years.

Yet critics argue that AI-generated content lacks the authenticity rooted in human experience, emotion, and intent. Whilst technically proficient, AI-generated works often feel hollow, lacking the depth that human creativity delivers. YouTube's mantra captures one approach to this tension: AI should not be a replacement for human creativity but should be a tool used to enhance creativity.

The labour implications are complex. Contrary to simplistic displacement narratives, research found that AI-assisted creative production was more labour-intensive than traditional methods, combining conventional production skills with new computational expertise. Yet conditions of deskilling, reskilling, flexible employment, and uncertainty remain intense, particularly for small firms. The future may not involve fewer creative workers, but it will likely demand different skills and tolerate greater precarity.

Across these industries, a common pattern emerges. AI offers genuine productivity benefits when used thoughtfully, but creates substantial risks when deployed carelessly. The challenge is building institutional structures that capture the benefits whilst mitigating the risks. So far, most organisations are still figuring out which side of that equation they're on.

The Human Skills Renaissance

If distinguishing valuable from superficial AI content has become the defining challenge of the information age, what capabilities must humans develop? The answer represents both a return to fundamentals and a leap into new territory.

The most crucial skill is also the most traditional: critical thinking. But the AI era demands a particular flavour of criticality, what researchers are calling “critical AI literacy.” This encompasses the ability to understand how AI systems work, recognise their limitations, identify potentially AI-generated content, and analyse the reliability of output in light of both content and the algorithmic processes that formed it.

Critical AI literacy requires understanding that AI systems, as one researcher noted, must be evaluated not just on content but on “the algorithmic processes that formed it.” This means knowing that large language models predict statistically likely next words rather than accessing verified knowledge databases. It means understanding that training data bias affects outputs. It means recognising that AI systems lack genuine understanding of context, causation, or truth.

Media literacy has been reframed for the AI age. Understanding how to discern credible information from misinformation is no longer just about evaluating sources and assessing intent. It now requires technical knowledge about how generative systems produce content, awareness of common failure modes like hallucinations, and familiarity with the aesthetic and linguistic signatures that might indicate synthetic origin.

Lateral reading has emerged as a particularly effective technique. Rather than deeply analysing a single source, lateral reading involves quickly leaving a website to search for information about the source's credibility through additional sources. This approach allows rapid, accurate assessment of trustworthiness in an environment where any individual source, no matter how polished, might be entirely synthetic.

Context evaluation has become paramount. AI systems struggle with nuance, subtext, and contextual appropriateness. They can generate content that's individually well-formed but situationally nonsensical. Humans who cultivate sensitivity to context, understanding what information matters in specific circumstances and how ideas connect to broader frameworks, maintain an advantage that current AI cannot replicate.

Verification skills now constitute a core competency across professions. Cross-referencing with trusted sources, identifying factual inconsistencies, evaluating the logic behind claims, and recognising algorithmic bias from skewed training data or flawed programming. These were once specialist skills for journalists and researchers; they're rapidly becoming baseline requirements for knowledge workers.

Educational institutions are beginning to adapt. Students are being challenged to detect deepfakes and AI-generated images through reverse image searches, learning to spot clues like fuzzy details, inconsistent lighting, and out-of-sync audio-visuals. They're introduced to concepts like algorithmic bias and training data limitations. The goal is not to make everyone a technical expert, but to build intuition about how AI systems can fail and what those failures look like.

Practical detection skills are being taught systematically. Students learn to check for inconsistencies and repetition, as AI produces nonsensical or odd sentences and abrupt shifts in tone or topic when struggling to maintain coherent ideas. They're taught to be suspicious of perfect grammar, as even accomplished writers make mistakes or intentionally break grammatical rules for emphasis. They learn to recognise when text seems unable to grasp larger context or feels basic and formulaic, hallmarks of AI struggling with complexity.

Perhaps most importantly, humans need to cultivate the ability to ask the right questions. AI systems are tremendously powerful tools for answering questions, but they're poor at determining which questions matter. Framing problems, identifying what's genuinely important versus merely urgent, understanding stakeholder needs, these remain distinctly human competencies. The most valuable workers won't be those who can use AI to generate content, but those who can use AI to pursue questions worth answering.

The skill set extends to what might be called “prompt engineering literacy,” understanding not just how to use AI tools but when and whether to use them. This includes recognising tasks where AI assistance genuinely enhances work versus situations where AI simply provides an illusion of productivity whilst creating downstream problems. It means knowing when the two hours you save generating a report will cost your colleagues four hours of confused clarification requests.

The Quality Evaluation Revolution

The workslop crisis is forcing a fundamental reconceptualisation of how we evaluate quality work. The traditional markers, polish, grammatical correctness, professional formatting, comprehensive coverage, have been automated. Quality assessment must evolve.

One emerging approach emphasises process over product. Rather than evaluating the final output, assess the thinking that produced it. In educational contexts, this means shifting from essays to oral examinations, presentations, or portfolios that document the evolution of understanding. In professional settings, it means valuing the ability to explain decisions, justify approaches, and articulate trade-offs.

Collaborative validation is gaining prominence. Instead of relying on individual judgement, organisations are implementing systems where multiple people review and discuss work before it's accepted. This approach not only improves detection of workslop but also builds collective understanding of quality standards. The BetterUp-Stanford research recommended that leaders model thoughtful AI use and cultivate “pilot” mindsets that use AI to enhance collaboration rather than avoid work.

Provenance tracking is becoming standard practice. Just as academic work requires citation, professional work increasingly demands transparency about what was human-generated, what was AI-assisted, and what was primarily AI-created with human review. This isn't about prohibiting AI use, it's about understanding the nature and reliability of information.

Some organisations are developing “authenticity markers,” indicators that work represents genuine human thinking. These might include requirements for original examples, personal insights, unexpected connections, or creative solutions to novel problems. The idea is to ask for deliverables that current AI systems struggle to produce, thereby ensuring human contribution.

Real-time verification is being embedded into workflows. Rather than reviewing work after completion, teams are building in checkpoints where claims can be validated, sources confirmed, and reasoning examined before progressing. This distributes the fact-checking burden and catches errors earlier, when they're easier to correct.

Industry-specific standards are emerging. In journalism, organisations are developing AI usage policies that specify what tasks are appropriate for automation and what requires human judgement. The consensus among experts is that whilst AI offers valuable efficiency tools for tasks like transcription and trend analysis, it poses significant risks to journalistic integrity, transparency, and public trust that require careful oversight and ethical guidelines.

In creative fields, discussions are ongoing about disclosure requirements for AI-assisted work. Some platforms now require creators to flag AI-generated elements. Industry bodies are debating whether AI assistance constitutes a fundamental change in creative authorship requiring new frameworks for attribution and copyright.

In academia, institutions are experimenting with different assessment methods that resist AI gaming whilst still measuring genuine learning. These include increased use of oral examinations, in-class writing with supervision, portfolios showing work evolution, and assignments requiring personal experience integration that AI cannot fabricate.

The shift is from evaluating outputs to evaluating outcomes. Does the work advance understanding? Does it enable better decisions? Does it create value beyond merely existing? These questions are harder to answer than “Is this grammatically correct?” or “Is this well-formatted?” but they're more meaningful in an era when surface competence has been commoditised.

The Path Forward

The workslop phenomenon reveals a fundamental truth: AI systems have become sophisticated enough to produce convincing simulacra of useful work whilst lacking the understanding necessary to ensure that work is actually useful. This gap between appearance and substance poses challenges that technology alone cannot solve.

The optimistic view holds that this is a temporary adjustment period. As detection tools improve, as users become more sophisticated, as AI systems develop better reasoning capabilities, the workslop problem will diminish. Google's 2025 research showing that models with built-in reasoning capabilities reduce hallucinations by up to 65 per cent offers some hope. December 2024 research found that simply asking an AI “Are you hallucinating right now?” reduced hallucination rates by 17 per cent, suggesting that relatively simple interventions might yield significant improvements.

Yet Gartner predicts that at least 30 per cent of generative AI projects will be abandoned after proof of concept by the end of 2025, due to poor data quality, inadequate risk controls, escalating costs, or unclear business value. The prediction acknowledges what's becoming increasingly obvious: the gap between AI's promise and its practical implementation remains substantial.

The pessimistic view suggests we're witnessing a more permanent transformation. If 90 per cent of internet content is AI-generated by 2030, as Gartner also projects, we're not experiencing a temporary flood but a regime change. The information ecosystem is fundamentally altered, and humans must adapt to permanent conditions of uncertainty about content provenance and reliability.

The realistic view likely lies between these extremes. AI capabilities will improve, reducing but not eliminating the workslop problem. Human skills will adapt, though perhaps not as quickly as technology evolves. Social and professional norms will develop around AI use, creating clearer expectations about when automation is appropriate and when human judgement is essential.

What seems certain is that quality evaluation is entering a new paradigm. The Industrial Revolution automated physical labour, forcing a social reckoning about the value of human work. The Information Revolution is automating cognitive labour, forcing a reckoning about the value of human thinking. Workslop represents the frothy edge of that wave, a visible manifestation of deeper questions about what humans contribute when machines can pattern-match and generate content.

The organisations, institutions, and individuals who will thrive are those who can articulate clear answers. What does human expertise add? When is AI assistance genuinely helpful versus merely convenient? How do we verify that work, however polished, actually advances our goals?

The Stanford-BetterUp research offered concrete guidance for leaders: set clear guardrails about AI use, model thoughtful implementation yourself, and cultivate organisational cultures that view AI as a tool for enhancement rather than avoidance of genuine work. These recommendations apply broadly beyond workplace contexts.

For individuals, the mandate is equally clear: develop the capacity to distinguish valuable from superficial content, cultivate skills that complement rather than compete with AI capabilities, and maintain scepticism about polish unaccompanied by substance. In an age of infinite content, curation and judgement become the scarcest resources.

Reckoning With Reality

The workslop crisis is teaching us, often painfully, that appearance and reality have diverged. Polished prose might conceal empty thinking. Comprehensive reports might lack meaningful insight. Perfect grammar might accompany perfect nonsense.

The phenomenon forces a question we've perhaps avoided too long: What is work actually for? If the goal is merely to produce deliverables that look professional, AI excels. If the goal is to advance understanding, solve problems, and create genuine value, humans remain essential. The challenge is building systems, institutions, and cultures that reward the latter whilst resisting the seductive ease of the former.

Four out of five respondents in a survey of U.S. adults expressed some level of worry about AI's role in election misinformation during the 2024 presidential election. This public concern reflects a broader anxiety about our capacity to distinguish truth from fabrication in an environment increasingly populated by synthetic content.

The deeper lesson is about what we value. In an era when sophisticated content can be generated at virtually zero marginal cost, scarcity shifts to qualities that resist automation: original thinking, contextual judgement, creative synthesis, ethical reasoning, and genuine understanding. These capabilities cannot be convincingly faked by current AI systems, making them the foundation of value in the emerging economy.

We stand at an inflection point. The choices we make now about AI use, quality standards, and human skill development will shape the information environment for decades. We can allow workslop to become the norm, accepting an ocean of superficiality punctuated by islands of substance. Or we can deliberately cultivate the capacity to distinguish, demand, and create work that matters.

The technology that created this problem will not solve it alone. That requires the distinctly human capacity for judgement, the ability to look beyond surface competence to ask whether work actually accomplishes anything worth accomplishing. In the age of workslop, that question has never been more important.

The Stanford-BetterUp study's findings about workplace relationships offer a sobering coda. When colleagues send workslop, 54 per cent of recipients view them as less creative, 42 per cent as less trustworthy, and 37 per cent as less intelligent. These aren't minor reputation dings; they're fundamental assessments of professional competence and character. The ease of generating superficially impressive content carries a hidden cost: the erosion of the very credibility and trust that make collaborative work possible.

As knowledge workers navigate this new landscape, they face a choice that previous generations didn't encounter quite so starkly. Use AI to genuinely enhance thinking, or use it to simulate thinking whilst avoiding the difficult cognitive work that creates real value. The former path is harder, requiring skill development, critical judgement, and ongoing effort. The latter offers seductive short-term ease whilst undermining long-term professional standing.

The workslop deluge isn't slowing. If anything, it's accelerating as AI tools become more accessible and organisations face pressure to adopt them. Worldwide generative AI spending is expected to reach $644 billion in 2025, an increase of 76.4 per cent from 2024. Ninety-two per cent of executives expect to boost AI spending over the next three years. The investment tsunami ensures that AI-generated content will proliferate, for better and worse.

But that acceleration makes the human capacity for discernment, verification, and genuine understanding more valuable, not less. In a world drowning in superficially convincing content, the ability to distinguish signal from noise, substance from appearance, becomes the defining competency of the age. The future belongs not to those who can generate the most content, but to those who can recognise which content actually matters.


Sources and References

Primary Research Studies

Stanford Social Media Lab and BetterUp (2024). “Workslop: The Hidden Cost of AI-Generated Busywork.” Survey of 1,150 full-time U.S. desk workers, September 2024. Available at: https://www.betterup.com/workslop

Harvard Business Review (2025). “AI-Generated 'Workslop' Is Destroying Productivity.” Published September 2025. Available at: https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity

Stanford University (2024). Study on LLM-generated legal hallucinations finding over 120 fabricated court cases. Published 2024.

Shin (2021). Research on reader trust in human-written versus AI-generated news stories.

AI Detection and Quality Assessment

Penn State University (2024). “The increasing difficulty of detecting AI- versus human-generated text.” Research showing humans distinguish AI text only 53% of the time. Available at: https://www.psu.edu/news/information-sciences-and-technology/story/qa-increasing-difficulty-detecting-ai-versus-human

International Journal for Educational Integrity (2023). “Evaluating the efficacy of AI content detection tools in differentiating between human and AI-generated text.” Study on detection tool inconsistencies. https://edintegrity.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s40979-023-00140-5

ScienceDirect (2024). “Do teachers spot AI? Evaluating the detectability of AI-generated texts among student essays.” Research showing both novice and experienced teachers unable to identify AI-generated text. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X24000109

AI Hallucinations Research

All About AI (2025). “AI Hallucination Report 2025: Which AI Hallucinates the Most?” Data on hallucination rates including o3 (33%) and o4-mini (48%), Gemini 2.0 Flash (0.7%). Available at: https://www.allaboutai.com/resources/ai-statistics/ai-hallucinations/

Techopedia (2025). “48% Error Rate: AI Hallucinations Rise in 2025 Reasoning Systems.” Analysis of advanced reasoning model hallucination rates. Published 2025.

Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review (2025). “New sources of inaccuracy? A conceptual framework for studying AI hallucinations.” Conceptual framework distinguishing AI hallucinations from traditional misinformation. https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/new-sources-of-inaccuracy-a-conceptual-framework-for-studying-ai-hallucinations/

Google (2025). Research showing models with built-in reasoning capabilities reduce hallucinations by up to 65%.

Google Researchers (December 2024). Study finding asking AI “Are you hallucinating right now?” reduced hallucination rates by 17%.

Real-World AI Failures

Google AI Overview (February 2025). Incident citing April Fool's satire about “microscopic bees powering computers” as factual.

Air Canada chatbot incident (2024). Case of chatbot providing misleading bereavement fare information resulting in financial loss.

AI Productivity Research

St. Louis Fed (2025). “The Impact of Generative AI on Work Productivity.” Research showing 5.4% average time savings in work hours for AI users in November 2024. https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/feb/impact-generative-ai-work-productivity

Apollo Technical (2025). “27 AI Productivity Statistics.” Data showing 40% average productivity boost, AI tripling productivity on one-third of tasks, 13.8% increase in customer service inquiries handled, 59% increase in documents written. https://www.apollotechnical.com/27-ai-productivity-statistics-you-want-to-know/

McKinsey & Company (2024). “The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier.” Research sizing AI opportunity at $4.4 trillion. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-economic-potential-of-generative-ai-the-next-productivity-frontier

Industry Adoption and Investment

McKinsey (2025). “The state of AI: How organizations are rewiring to capture value.” Data showing 78% of organizations using AI (up from 55% prior year), 65% regularly using gen AI, 92% of executives expecting to boost AI spending. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai

Gartner (2024). Prediction that 30% of generative AI projects will be abandoned after proof of concept by end of 2025. Press release, July 29, 2024. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-07-29-gartner-predicts-30-percent-of-generative-ai-projects-will-be-abandoned-after-proof-of-concept-by-end-of-2025

Gartner (2024). Survey showing 15.8% revenue increase, 15.2% cost savings, 22.6% productivity improvement from AI implementation.

Sequencr.ai (2025). “Key Generative AI Statistics and Trends for 2025.” Data on worldwide Gen AI spending expected to total $644 billion in 2025 (76.4% increase), average 3.7x ROI. https://www.sequencr.ai/insights/key-generative-ai-statistics-and-trends-for-2025

Industry Impact Studies

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2025). “Generative AI and news report 2025: How people think about AI's role in journalism and society.” Six-country survey showing sentiment scores for AI in journalism. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/generative-ai-and-news-report-2025-how-people-think-about-ais-role-journalism-and-society

Brookings Institution (2024). “Journalism needs better representation to counter AI.” Workshop findings identifying threats including narrative homogenisation and increased Big Tech dependence, July 2024. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/journalism-needs-better-representation-to-counter-ai/

ScienceDirect (2024). “The impending disruption of creative industries by generative AI: Opportunities, challenges, and research agenda.” Research on creative industry adoption (80%+ integration, 87% U.S. creatives, 20% required use, 99% entertainment executive plans). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0268401224000070

AI Slop and Internet Content Pollution

Wikipedia (2024). “AI slop.” Definition and characteristics of AI-generated low-quality content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop

The Conversation (2024). “What is AI slop? A technologist explains this new and largely unwelcome form of online content.” Expert analysis of slop phenomenon. https://theconversation.com/what-is-ai-slop-a-technologist-explains-this-new-and-largely-unwelcome-form-of-online-content-256554

Gartner (2024). Projection that 90% of internet content could be AI-generated by 2030.

Clarkesworld Magazine (2024). Case study of science fiction magazine stopping submissions due to AI-generated story deluge.

Hurricane Helene (September 2024). Documentation of AI-generated images hindering emergency response efforts.

Media Literacy and Critical Thinking

eSchool News (2024). “Critical thinking in the digital age of AI: Information literacy is key.” Analysis of essential skills for AI age. Published August 2024. https://www.eschoolnews.com/digital-learning/2024/08/16/critical-thinking-digital-age-ai-information-literacy/

Harvard Graduate School of Education (2024). “Media Literacy Education and AI.” Framework for AI literacy education. https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/education-now/24/04/media-literacy-education-and-ai

Nature (2025). “Navigating the landscape of AI literacy education: insights from a decade of research (2014–2024).” Comprehensive review of AI literacy development. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04583-8

International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education (2024). “Embracing the future of Artificial Intelligence in the classroom: the relevance of AI literacy, prompt engineering, and critical thinking in modern education.” Research on critical AI literacy and prompt engineering skills. https://educationaltechnologyjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41239-024-00448-3

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Tim Green

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Discuss...

Your home is learning. Every time you adjust the thermostat, ask Alexa to play music, or let Google Assistant order groceries, you're training an invisible housemate that never sleeps, never forgets, and increasingly makes decisions on your behalf. The smart home revolution promised convenience, but it's delivering something far more complex: a fundamental transformation of domestic space, family relationships, and personal autonomy.

The statistics paint a striking picture. The global AI in smart home technology market reached $12.7 billion in 2023 and is predicted to soar to $57.3 billion by 2031, growing at 21.3 per cent annually. By 2024, more than 375 million AI-centric households exist worldwide, with smart speaker users expected to reach 400 million. These aren't just gadgets; they're autonomous agents embedding themselves into the fabric of family life.

But as these AI systems gain control over everything from lighting to security, they're raising urgent questions about who really runs our homes. Are we directing our domestic environments, or are algorithms quietly nudging our behaviour in ways we barely notice? And what happens to family dynamics when an AI assistant becomes the household's de facto decision-maker, mediator, and memory-keeper?

When Your House Has an Opinion

The smart home of 2025 isn't passive. Today's AI-powered residences anticipate needs, learn preferences, and make autonomous decisions. Amazon's Alexa Plus, powered by generative AI and free with Prime, represents this evolution. More than 600 million Alexa devices worldwide understand context, recognise individual family members, and create automations through conversation.

Google's Gemini assistant and Apple's revamped Siri follow similar paths. At the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show, LG Electronics unveiled an AI agent using robotics that moves through homes, learns routines, and carries on sophisticated conversations. These aren't prototypes; they're commercial products shipping today.

The technical capabilities have expanded dramatically. Version 1.4 of the Matter protocol, released in November 2024, introduced support for batteries, solar systems, water heaters, and heat pumps. Matter, founded by Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Connectivity Standards Alliance, aims to solve the interoperability nightmare plaguing smart homes for years. The protocol enables devices from different manufacturers to communicate seamlessly, creating truly integrated home environments rather than competing ecosystems locked behind proprietary walls.

This interoperability accelerates a crucial shift from individual smart devices to cohesive AI agents managing entire households. Voice assistants represented 33.04 per cent of the AI home automation market in 2024, valued at $6.77 billion, projected as the fastest-growing segment at 34.49 per cent annually through 2029. The transformation isn't about market share; it's about how these systems reshape the intimate spaces where families eat, sleep, argue, and reconcile.

The New Household Dynamic: Who's Really in Charge?

When Brandon McDaniel and colleagues at the Parkview Mirro Center for Research and Innovation studied families' relationships with conversational AI agents, they discovered something unexpected: attachment-like behaviours. Their 2025 research in Family Relations found that approximately half of participants reported daily digital assistant use, with many displaying moderate attachment-like behaviour towards their AI companions.

“As conversational AI becomes part of people's environments, their attachment system may become activated,” McDaniel's team wrote. While future research must determine whether these represent true human-AI attachment, the implications for family dynamics are already visible. Higher frequency of use correlated with higher attachment-like behaviour and parents' perceptions of both positive and negative impacts.

When children develop attachment-like relationships with Alexa or Google Assistant, what happens to parent-child dynamics? A study of 305 Dutch parents with children aged three to eight found motivation for using voice assistants stemmed primarily from enjoyment, especially when used together with their children. However, parents perceived that dependence on AI increased risks to safety and privacy.

Family dynamics grow increasingly complex when AI agents assume specific household roles. A 2025 commentary in Family Relations explored three distinct personas: home maintainer, guardian, or companion. Each reshapes family relationships differently.

As a home maintainer, AI systems manage thermostats, lighting, and appliances, theoretically reducing household management burdens. But this seemingly neutral function can shift the gender division of chores and introduce new forms of control through digital housekeeping. Brookings Institution research highlights this paradox: nearly 40 per cent of domestic chores could be automated within a decade, yet history suggests caution. Washing machines and dishwashers, introduced as labour-saving devices over a century ago, haven't eliminated the gender gap in household chores. These tools reduced time on specific tasks but shifted rather than alleviated the broader burden of care work.

The guardian role presents even thornier ethical terrain. AI monitoring household safety reshapes intimate surveillance practices within families. When cameras track children's movements, sensors report teenagers' comings and goings, algorithms analyse conversations for signs of distress, traditional boundaries blur. Parents gain unprecedented monitoring capabilities, but at what cost to children's autonomy and trust?

As a companion, domestic AI shapes or is shaped by existing household dynamics in ways researchers are only beginning to understand. When families turn to AI for entertainment, information, and even emotional support, these systems become active participants in family life rather than passive tools. The question isn't whether this is happening; it's what it means for human relationships when algorithms mediate family interactions.

The Privacy Paradox: Convenience Versus Control

The smart home operates on a fundamental exchange: convenience for data. Every interaction generates behavioural information flowing to corporate servers, where it's analysed, packaged, and often sold to third parties. This data collection apparatus represents what Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff termed “surveillance capitalism” in her influential work.

Zuboff defines it as “the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data, which are then computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioural futures markets.” Smart home devices epitomise this model perfectly. ProPublica reported breathing machines for sleep apnea secretly send usage data to health insurers, where the information justifies reduced payments. If medical devices engage in such covert collection, what might smart home assistants be sharing?

The technical reality reinforces these concerns. A 2021 YouGov survey found 60 to 70 per cent of UK adults believe their smartphones and smart speakers listen to conversations unprompted. A PwC study found 40 per cent of voice assistant users still worry about what happens to their voice data. These aren't baseless fears; they reflect the opacity of data collection practices in smart home ecosystems.

Academic research confirms the privacy vulnerabilities. An international team led by IMDEA Networks and Northeastern University found opaque Internet of Things devices inadvertently expose sensitive data within local networks: device names, unique identifiers, household geolocation. Companies can harvest this information without user awareness. Among a control group, 91 per cent experienced unwanted Alexa recordings, and 29.2 per cent reported some contained sensitive information.

The security threats extend beyond passive data collection. Security researcher Matt Kunze discovered a flaw in Google Home speakers allowing hackers to install backdoor accounts, enabling remote control and transforming the device into a listening device. Google awarded Kunze $107,500 for responsibly disclosing the threat. In 2019, researchers demonstrated hackers could control these devices from 360 feet using a laser pointer. These vulnerabilities aren't theoretical; they're actively exploited attack vectors in homes worldwide.

Yet users continue adopting smart home technology at accelerating rates. Researchers describe this phenomenon as “privacy resignation,” a state where users understand risks but feel powerless to resist convenience and social pressure to participate in smart home ecosystems. Studies show users express few initial privacy concerns, but their rationalisations indicate incomplete understanding of privacy risks and complicated trust relationships with device manufacturers.

Users' mental models about smart home assistants are often limited to their household and the vendor, even when using third-party skills that access their data. This incomplete understanding leaves users vulnerable to privacy violations they don't anticipate and can't prevent using existing tools.

The Autonomy Question: Who Decides?

Personal autonomy sits at the heart of the smart home dilemma. The concept encompasses the freedom to make meaningful choices about one's life without undue external influence. AI home agents challenge this freedom in subtle but profound ways.

Consider the algorithmic nudge. Smart homes don't merely respond to preferences; they shape them. When your thermostat learns your schedule and adjusts automatically, you're ceding thermal control to an algorithm. When your smart refrigerator suggests recipes based on inventory analysis, it's influencing your meal decisions. When lighting creates ambience based on time and detected activities, it's architecting your home environment according to its programming, not necessarily your conscious preferences.

These micro-decisions accumulate into macro-influence. Researchers describe this phenomenon as “hypernudging,” a dynamic, highly personalised, opaque form of regulating choice architectures through big data techniques. Unlike traditional nudges, which are relatively transparent and static, hypernudges adapt in real-time through continuous data collection and analysis, making them harder to recognise and resist.

Manipulation concerns intensify when considering how AI agents learn and evolve. Machine learning systems optimise for engagement and continued use, not necessarily for users' wellbeing. When a voice assistant learns certain response types keep you interacting longer, it might prioritise those patterns even if they don't best serve your interests. System goals and your goals can diverge without your awareness.

Family decision-making processes shift under AI influence. A study exploring families' visions of AI agents for household safety found participants wanted to communicate and make final decisions themselves, though acknowledging agents might offer convenient or less judgemental channels for discussing safety issues. Children specifically expressed a desire for autonomy to first discuss safety issues with AI, then discuss them with parents using their own terms.

This finding reveals the delicate balance families seek: using AI as a tool without ceding ultimate authority to algorithms. But maintaining this balance requires technical literacy, vigilance, and control mechanisms that current smart home systems rarely provide.

Autonomy challenges magnify for vulnerable populations. Older adults and individuals with disabilities often benefit tremendously from AI-assisted living, gaining independence they couldn't achieve otherwise. Smart home technologies enable older adults to live autonomously for extended periods, with systems swiftly detecting emergencies and deviations in behaviour patterns. Yet researchers emphasise these systems must enhance rather than diminish user autonomy, supporting independence while respecting decision-making abilities.

A 2025 study published in Frontiers in Digital Health argued AI surveillance in elder care must “begin with a moral commitment to human dignity rather than prioritising safety and efficiency over agency and autonomy.” The research found older adults' risk perceptions and tolerance regarding independent living often differ from family and professional caregivers' perspectives. One study found adult children preferred in-home monitoring technologies more than their elderly parents, highlighting how AI systems can become tools for imposing others' preferences rather than supporting the user's autonomy.

Research reveals ongoing monitoring, even when aimed at protection, produces feelings of anxiety, helplessness, or withdrawal from ordinary activities among older adults. The technologies designed to enable independence can paradoxically undermine it, transforming homes from private sanctuaries into surveilled environments where residents feel constantly watched and judged.

The Erosion of Private Domestic Space

The concept of home as a private sanctuary runs deep in Western culture and law. Courts have long recognised heightened expectations of privacy within domestic spaces, providing legal protections that don't apply to public venues. Smart home technology challenges these boundaries, turning private spaces into data-generating environments where every action becomes observable, recordable, and analysable.

Alexander Orlowski and Wulf Loh of the University of Tuebingen's International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities examined this transformation in their 2025 paper published in AI & Society. They argue smart home applications operate within “a space both morally and legally particularly protected and characterised by an implicit expectation of privacy from the user's perspective.”

Yet current regulatory efforts haven't kept pace with smart home environments. Collection and processing of user data in these spaces lack transparency and control. Users often remain unaware of the extent to which their data is being gathered, stored, and potentially shared with third parties. The home, traditionally a space shielded from external observation, becomes permeable when saturated with networked sensors and AI agents reporting to external servers.

This permeability affects family relationships and individual behaviour in ways both obvious and subtle. When family members know conversations might trigger smart speaker recordings, they self-censor. When teenagers realise their movements are tracked by smart home sensors, their sense of privacy and autonomy diminishes. When parents can monitor children's every activity through networked devices, traditional developmental processes of testing boundaries and building independence face new obstacles.

Surveillance extends beyond intentional monitoring. Smart home devices communicate constantly with manufacturers' servers, generating continuous data streams about household activities, schedules, and preferences. This ambient surveillance normalises the idea that homes aren't truly private spaces but rather nodes in vast corporate data collection networks.

Research on security and privacy perspectives of people living in shared home environments reveals additional complications. Housemates, family members, and domestic workers may have conflicting privacy preferences and unequal power to enforce them. When one person installs a smart speaker with always-listening microphones, everyone in the household becomes subject to potential recording regardless of their consent. The collective nature of household privacy creates ethical dilemmas current smart home systems aren't designed to address.

The architectural and spatial experience of home shifts as well. Homes have traditionally provided different zones of privacy, from public living spaces to intimate bedrooms. Smart home sensors blur these distinctions, creating continuous surveillance that erases gradients of privacy. The bedroom monitored by a smart speaker isn't fully private; the bathroom with a voice-activated assistant isn't truly solitary. The psychological experience of home as refuge diminishes when you can't be certain you're unobserved.

Children Growing Up With AI Companions

Perhaps nowhere are the implications more profound than in childhood development. Today's children are the first generation growing up with AI agents as household fixtures, encountering Alexa and Google Assistant as fundamental features of their environment from birth.

Research on virtual assistants in family homes reveals these devices are particularly prevalent in households with young children. A Dutch study of families with children aged three to eight found families differ mainly in parents' digital literacy skills, frequency of voice assistant use, trust in technology, and preferred degree of child media mediation.

But what are children learning from these interactions? Voice-activated virtual assistants provide quick answers to children's questions, potentially reducing the burden on parents to be constant sources of information. They can engage children in educational conversations and provide entertainment. Yet they also model specific interaction patterns and relationship dynamics that may shape children's social development in ways researchers are only beginning to understand.

When children form attachment-like relationships with AI assistants, as McDaniel's research suggests is happening, what does this mean for their developing sense of relationships, authority, and trust? Unlike human caregivers, AI assistants respond instantly, never lose patience, and don't require reciprocal care. They provide information without the uncertainty and nuance that characterise human knowledge. They offer entertainment without the negotiation that comes with asking family members to share time and attention.

These differences might seem beneficial on the surface. Children get immediate answers and entertainment without burdening busy parents. But developmental psychologists emphasise the importance of frustration tolerance, delayed gratification, and learning to navigate imperfect human relationships. When AI assistants provide frictionless interactions, children may miss crucial developmental experiences that shape emotional intelligence and social competence.

The data collection dimension adds another layer of concern. Children interacting with smart home devices generate valuable behavioural data that companies use to refine their products and potentially target marketing. Parents often lack full visibility into what data is collected, how it's analysed, and who has access to it. The global smart baby monitor market alone was valued at approximately $1.2 billion in 2023, with projections to reach over $2.5 billion by 2030, while the broader “AI parenting” market could reach $20 billion within the next decade. These figures represent significant commercial interest in monitoring and analysing children's behaviour.

Research on technology interference or “technoference” in parent-child relationships reveals additional concerns. A cross-sectional study found parents reported an average of 3.03 devices interfered daily with their interactions with children. Almost two-thirds of parents agreed they were worried about the impact of their mobile device use on their children and believed a computer-assisted coach would help them notice more quickly when device use interferes with caregiving.

The irony is striking: parents turn to AI assistants partly to reduce technology interference, yet these assistants represent additional technology mediating family relationships. The solution becomes part of the problem, creating recursive patterns where technology addresses issues created by technology, each iteration generating more data and deeper system integration.

Proposed Solutions and Alternative Futures

Recognition of smart home privacy and autonomy challenges has sparked various technical and regulatory responses. Some researchers and companies are developing privacy-preserving technologies that could enable smart home functionality without comprehensive surveillance.

Orlowski and Loh's proposed privacy smart home meta-assistant represents one technical approach. This system would provide real-time transparency, displaying which devices are collecting data, what type of data is being gathered, and where it's being sent. It would enable selective data blocking, allowing users to disable specific sensors or functions without turning off entire devices. The meta-assistant concept aims to shift control from manufacturers to users, creating genuine data autonomy within smart home environments.

Researchers at the University of Michigan developed PrivacyMic, which uses ultrasonic sound at frequencies above human hearing range to enable smart home functionality without eavesdropping on audible conversations. This technical solution addresses one of the most sensitive aspects of smart home surveillance: always-listening microphones in intimate spaces.

For elder care applications, researchers are developing camera-based monitoring systems that address dual objectives of privacy and safety using AI-driven techniques for real-time subject anonymisation. Rather than traditional pixelisation or blurring, these systems replace subjects with two-dimensional avatars. Such avatar-based systems can reduce feelings of intrusion and discomfort associated with constant monitoring, thereby aligning with elderly people's expectations for dignity and independence.

A “Dignity-First” framework proposed by researchers includes informed and ongoing consent as a dynamic process, with regular check-in points and user-friendly settings enabling users or caregivers to modify permissions. This approach recognises that consent isn't a one-time event but an ongoing negotiation that must adapt as circumstances and preferences change.

Regulatory approaches are evolving as well, though they lag behind technological development. Data protection frameworks like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation establish principles of consent, transparency, and user control that theoretically apply to smart home devices. However, enforcement remains challenging, and many users struggle to exercise their nominal rights due to complex interfaces and opaque data practices.

The Matter protocol's success in establishing interoperability standards demonstrates that industry coordination on technical specifications is achievable. Similar coordination on privacy and security standards could establish baseline protections across smart home ecosystems. The Connectivity Standards Alliance could expand its mandate beyond device communication to encompass privacy protocols, creating industry-wide expectations for data minimisation, transparency, and user control.

Consumer education represents another crucial component. Research consistently shows users have incomplete mental models of smart home privacy risks and limited understanding of how data flows through these systems. Educational initiatives could help users make more informed decisions about which devices to adopt, how to configure them, and what privacy trade-offs they're accepting.

Some families are developing their own strategies for managing AI agents in household contexts. These include establishing device-free zones or times, having explicit family conversations about AI use and privacy expectations, teaching children to question and verify AI-provided information, and regularly reviewing and adjusting smart home configurations and permissions.

The Path Forward: Reclaiming Domestic Agency

The smart home revolution isn't reversible, nor should it necessarily be. AI agents offer genuine benefits for household management, accessibility, energy efficiency, and convenience. The challenge isn't to reject these technologies but to ensure they serve human values rather than subordinating them to commercial imperatives.

This requires reconceptualising the relationship between households and AI agents. Rather than viewing smart homes as consumer products that happen to collect data, we must recognise them as sociotechnical systems that reshape domestic life, family relationships, and personal autonomy. This recognition demands different design principles, regulatory frameworks, and social norms.

Design principles should prioritise transparency, user control, and reversibility. Smart home systems should clearly communicate what data they collect, how they use it, and who can access it. Users should have granular control over data collection and device functionality, with the ability to disable specific features without losing all benefits. Design should support reversibility, allowing users to disengage from smart home systems without losing access to their homes' basic functions.

Regulatory frameworks should establish enforceable standards for data minimisation, requiring companies to collect only data necessary for providing services users explicitly request. They should mandate interoperability and data portability, preventing vendor lock-in and enabling users to switch between providers. They should create meaningful accountability mechanisms with sufficient penalties to deter privacy violations and security negligence.

Social norms around smart homes are still forming. Families, communities, and societies have opportunities to establish expectations about appropriate AI agent roles in domestic spaces. These norms might include conventions about obtaining consent from household members before installing monitoring devices, expectations for regular family conversations about technology use and boundaries, and cultural recognition that some aspects of domestic life should remain unmediated by algorithms.

Educational initiatives should help users understand smart home systems' capabilities, limitations, and implications. This includes technical literacy about how devices work and data flows, but also broader critical thinking about what values and priorities should govern domestic technology choices.

The goal isn't perfect privacy or complete autonomy; both have always been aspirational rather than absolute. The goal is ensuring that smart home adoption represents genuine choice rather than coerced convenience, that the benefits accrue to users rather than extracting value from them, and that domestic spaces remain fundamentally under residents' control even as they incorporate AI agents.

Research by family relations scholars emphasises the importance of communication and intentionality. When families approach smart home adoption thoughtfully, discussing their values and priorities, establishing boundaries and expectations, and regularly reassessing their technology choices, AI agents can enhance rather than undermine domestic life. When they adopt devices reactively, without consideration of privacy implications or family dynamics, they risk ceding control of their intimate spaces to systems optimised for corporate benefit rather than household wellbeing.

Conclusion: Writing Our Own Domestic Future

As I adjust my smart thermostat while writing this, ask my voice assistant to play background music, and let my robotic vacuum clean around my desk, I'm acutely aware of the contradictions inherent in our current moment. We live in homes that are simultaneously more convenient and more surveilled, more automated and more controlled by external actors, more connected and more vulnerable than ever before.

The question isn't whether AI agents will continue proliferating through our homes; market projections make clear that they will. The United States smart home market alone is expected to reach over $87 billion by 2032, with the integration of AI with Internet of Things devices playing a crucial role in advancement and adoption. Globally, the smart home automation market is estimated to reach $254.3 billion by 2034, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 13.7 per cent.

The question is whether this proliferation happens on terms that respect human autonomy, dignity, and the sanctity of domestic space, or whether it continues along current trajectories that prioritise corporate data collection and behaviour modification over residents' agency and privacy.

The answer depends on choices made by technology companies, regulators, researchers, and perhaps most importantly, by individuals and families deciding how to incorporate AI agents into their homes. Each choice to demand better privacy protections, to question default settings, to establish family technology boundaries, or to support regulatory initiatives represents a small act of resistance against the passive acceptance of surveillance capitalism in our most intimate spaces.

The home has always been where we retreat from public performance, where we can be ourselves without external judgement, where family bonds form and individual identity develops. As AI agents increasingly mediate these spaces, we must ensure they remain tools serving household residents rather than corporate proxies extracting value from our domestic lives.

The smart home future isn't predetermined. It's being written right now through the collective choices of everyone navigating these technologies. We can write a future where AI agents enhance human flourishing, support family relationships, and respect individual autonomy. But doing so requires vigilance, intention, and willingness to prioritise human values over algorithmic convenience.

The invisible housemate is here to stay. The question is: who's really in charge?


Sources and References

  1. InsightAce Analytic. (2024). “AI in Smart Home Technology Market Analysis and Forecast 2024-2031.” Market valued at USD 12.7 billion in 2023, predicted to reach USD 57.3 billion by 2031 at 21.3% CAGR.

  2. Restack. (2024). “Smart Home AI Adoption Statistics.” Number of AI-centric houses worldwide expected to exceed 375.3 million by 2024, with smart speaker users reaching 400 million.

  3. Market.us. (2024). “AI In Home Automation Market Size, Share | CAGR of 27%.” Global market reached $20.51 billion in 2024, expected to grow to $75.16 billion by 2029 at 29.65% CAGR.

  4. Amazon. (2024). “Introducing Alexa+, the next generation of Alexa.” Over 600 million Alexa devices in use globally, powered by generative AI.

  5. Connectivity Standards Alliance. (2024). “Matter 1.4 Enables More Capable Smart Homes.” Version 1.4 released November 7, 2024, introducing support for batteries, solar systems, water heaters, and heat pumps.

  6. McDaniel, Brandon T., et al. (2025). “Emerging Ideas. A brief commentary on human–AI attachment and possible impacts on family dynamics.” Family Relations, Vol. 74, Issue 3, pages 1072-1079. Approximately half of participants reported at least daily digital assistant use with moderate attachment-like behaviour.

  7. McDaniel, Brandon T., et al. (2025). “Parent and child attachment-like behaviors with conversational AI agents and perceptions of impact on family dynamics.” Research repository, Parkview Mirro Center for Research and Innovation.

  8. ScienceDirect. (2022). “Virtual assistants in the family home: Understanding parents' motivations to use virtual assistants with their child(dren).” Study of 305 Dutch parents with children ages 3-8 using Google Assistant-powered smart speakers.

  9. Wiley Online Library. (2025). “Home maintainer, guardian or companion? Three commentaries on the implications of domestic AI in the household.” Family Relations, examining three distinct personas domestic AI might assume.

  10. Brookings Institution. (2023). “The gendered division of household labor and emerging technologies.” Nearly 40% of time spent on domestic chores could be automated within next decade.

  11. Zuboff, Shoshana. (2019). “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.” Harvard Business School Faculty Research. Defines surveillance capitalism as unilateral claiming of private human experience as raw material for behavioural data.

  12. Harvard Gazette. (2019). “Harvard professor says surveillance capitalism is undermining democracy.” Interview with Professor Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism's impact.

  13. YouGov. (2021). Survey finding approximately 60-70% of UK adults believe smartphones and smart speakers listen to conversations unprompted.

  14. PwC. Study finding 40% of voice assistant users have concerns about voice data handling.

  15. IMDEA Networks and Northeastern University. (2024). Research on security and privacy challenges posed by IoT devices in smart homes, finding inadvertent exposure of sensitive data including device names, UUIDs, and household geolocation.

  16. ACM Digital Library. (2018). “Alexa, Are You Listening?: Privacy Perceptions, Concerns and Privacy-seeking Behaviors with Smart Speakers.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 2, No. CSCW. Found 91% experienced unwanted Alexa recording; 29.2% contained sensitive information.

  17. PacketLabs. Security researcher Matt Kunze's discovery of Google Home speaker flaw enabling backdoor account installation; awarded $107,500 by Google.

  18. Nature Communications. (2024). “Inevitable challenges of autonomy: ethical concerns in personalized algorithmic decision-making.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, examining algorithmic decision-making's impact on user autonomy.

  19. arXiv. (2025). “Families' Vision of Generative AI Agents for Household Safety Against Digital and Physical Threats.” Study with 13 parent-child dyads investigating attitudes toward AI agent-assisted safety management.

  20. Orlowski, Alexander and Loh, Wulf. (2025). “Data autonomy and privacy in the smart home: the case for a privacy smart home meta-assistant.” AI & Society, Volume 40. International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (IZEW), University of Tuebingen, Germany. Received March 26, 2024; accepted January 10, 2025.

  21. Frontiers in Digital Health. (2025). “Designing for dignity: ethics of AI surveillance in older adult care.” Research arguing technologies must begin with moral commitment to human dignity.

  22. BMC Geriatrics. (2020). “Are we ready for artificial intelligence health monitoring in elder care?” Examining ethical concerns including erosion of privacy and dignity, finding older adults' risk perceptions differ from caregivers'.

  23. MDPI Applied Sciences. (2024). “AI-Driven Privacy in Elderly Care: Developing a Comprehensive Solution for Camera-Based Monitoring of Older Adults.” Vol. 14, No. 10. Research on avatar-based anonymisation systems.

  24. University of Michigan. (2024). “PrivacyMic: For a smart speaker that doesn't eavesdrop.” Development of ultrasonic sound-based system enabling smart home functionality without eavesdropping.

  25. PMC. (2021). “Parents' Perspectives on Using Artificial Intelligence to Reduce Technology Interference During Early Childhood: Cross-sectional Online Survey.” Study finding parents reported mean of 3.03 devices interfered daily with child interactions.

  26. Markets and Markets. (2023). Global smart baby monitor market valued at approximately $1.2 billion in 2023, projected to reach over $2.5 billion by 2030.

  27. Global Market Insights. (2024). “Smart Home Automation Market Size, Share & Trend Report, 2034.” Market valued at $73.7 billion in 2024, estimated to reach $254.3 billion by 2034 at 13.7% CAGR.

  28. Globe Newswire. (2024). “United States Smart Home Market to Reach Over $87 Billion by 2032.” Market analysis showing integration of AI with IoT playing crucial role in advancement and adoption.

  29. Matter Alpha. (2024). “2024: The Year Smart Home Interoperability Began to Matter.” Analysis of Matter protocol's impact on smart home compatibility.

  30. Connectivity Standards Alliance. (2024). “Matter 1.3” specification published May 8, 2024, adding support for water and energy management devices and appliance support.


Tim Green

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Discuss...

Look up at the night sky, and you might spot a satellite streaking across the darkness. What you won't see is the invisible minefield surrounding our planet: more than 28,000 tracked objects hurtling through orbit at speeds exceeding 28,000 kilometres per hour, according to the European Space Agency. This orbital debris population includes defunct satellites, spent rocket stages, fragments from explosions, and the shrapnel from collisions that happened decades ago. They're still up there, circling Earth like a swarm of high-velocity bullets.

The problem isn't just that there's a lot of junk in space. It's that tracking all of it has become a monumentally complex task that's pushing human analysts to their breaking point. With thousands of objects to monitor, predict trajectories for, and assess collision risks from, the traditional approach of humans staring at screens and crunching numbers simply doesn't scale anymore. Not when a single collision can create thousands of new fragments, each one a potential threat to operational satellites worth hundreds of millions.

Enter machine learning, the technology that's already transformed everything from facial recognition to protein folding prediction. Can these algorithms succeed where human analysts are failing? Can artificial intelligence actually solve a problem that's literally growing faster than humans can keep up with it?

The answer, it turns out, is complicated. And fascinating.

The Scale of the Tracking Crisis

To understand why we need machine learning in the first place, you need to grasp just how overwhelming the space debris tracking problem has become. According to NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office, there are approximately 28,160 objects larger than 10 centimetres currently being tracked by the US Space Surveillance Network. That's just what we can see with current ground-based radar and optical systems.

The actual number is far worse. ESA estimates there are roughly 900,000 objects larger than one centimetre orbiting Earth right now. At orbital velocities of around 28,000 kilometres per hour, even a paint fleck can strike with the force of a hand grenade. A 10-centimetre piece of debris? That's enough to catastrophically destroy a spacecraft. The International Space Station needs special shielding just to protect against anything larger than one centimetre.

Here's the truly horrifying part: we can only track about three per cent of the actual debris population. The other 97 per cent is invisible to current detection systems, but very much capable of destroying satellites that cost hundreds of millions to build and launch.

Tim Flohrer, head of ESA's Space Debris Office, has stated that collision avoidance manoeuvres have increased dramatically. In 2020 alone, ESA performed 28 manoeuvres, more than double the number from just a few years earlier. Each one requires careful analysis, fuel expenditure, and operational disruption.

These aren't trivial decisions. Every manoeuvre consumes precious fuel that satellites need to maintain their orbits over years or decades. Run out of fuel early, and your multi-million-pound satellite becomes useless junk. Operators must balance immediate collision risk against long-term operational life. Get it wrong, and you either waste fuel on unnecessary manoeuvres or risk a catastrophic collision.

The calculations are complex because orbital mechanics is inherently uncertain. You're trying to predict where two objects will be days from now, accounting for atmospheric drag that varies with solar activity, radiation pressure from the sun, and gravitational perturbations from the moon. Small errors in any of these factors can mean the difference between a clean miss and a collision.

The Union of Concerned Scientists maintains a database showing there are currently over 7,560 operational satellites in orbit as of May 2023. With companies like SpaceX deploying mega-constellations numbering in the thousands, that number is set to explode. More satellites mean more collision risks, more tracking requirements, and more data for analysts to process.

And it's not just the number of satellites that matters. It's where they are. Low Earth orbit, between 200 and 2,000 kilometres altitude, is getting crowded. This is prime real estate for satellite constellations because signals reach Earth quickly with minimal delay. But it's also where most debris resides, and where collision velocities are highest. Pack thousands of satellites into overlapping orbits in this region, and you're creating a high-speed demolition derby.

Human analysts at organisations like the US Space Force's 18th Space Defense Squadron and ESA's Space Debris Office are drowning in data. Every tracked object needs its orbit updated regularly as atmospheric drag, solar radiation, and gravity alter trajectories. For each of the 28,000+ objects, analysts must calculate where it will be hours, days, and weeks from now. Then they must check if any two objects might collide.

The maths gets ugly fast. Each new object doesn't just mean one more thing to track. It means checking if that object might hit any of the thousands of existing objects. With 28,000 objects, there are potentially hundreds of millions of collision checks to perform each day.

When a potential collision is identified, analysts must determine the probability of collision, decide whether to manoeuvre, and coordinate with satellite operators, often with only hours of warning. A probability of 1 in 10,000 might sound safe until you realise thousands of such assessments happen daily. Different operators use different thresholds, but there's no universal standard.

It's a system that's fundamentally broken by its own success. The better we get at launching satellites, the worse the tracking problem becomes. Each successful launch eventually adds derelict objects to the debris population. Even satellites designed for responsible end-of-life disposal sometimes fail to deorbit successfully.

Consider the economics. Launching satellites generates revenue and provides services: communications, navigation, Earth observation, weather forecasting. These are tangible benefits that justify the costs. Tracking the resulting debris? That's a pure cost with no direct revenue. It's a classic collective action problem: everyone benefits from better tracking, but no individual operator wants to pay for it.

The result is that tracking infrastructure is chronically underfunded relative to the challenge it faces. The US Space Surveillance Network, the most capable tracking system in the world, operates radar and optical systems that are decades old. Upgrades happen slowly. Meanwhile, the number of objects to track grows exponentially.

How Machine Learning Entered the Orbital Battlespace

Machine learning didn't arrive in space debris tracking with fanfare and press releases. It crept in gradually, as frustrated analysts and researchers realised traditional computational methods simply couldn't keep pace with the exponentially growing problem.

The tipping point came around 2015-2016. Computational power had reached the point where training complex neural networks was feasible. Datasets from decades of debris tracking operations were large enough to train meaningful models. And crucially, the tracking problem had become desperate enough that organisations were willing to try unconventional approaches.

The traditional approach relies on physics-based models. You observe an object's position at multiple points in time, then use equations that describe how things move under gravity and other forces to predict where it will be next. These methods work brilliantly when you have good observations and plenty of time.

But space debris tracking doesn't offer those luxuries. Many objects are observed infrequently or with poor accuracy. Small debris tumbles unpredictably. Atmospheric density varies with solar activity in ways that are hard to model precisely. For thousands of objects, you need predictions updated continuously, not once a week.

Machine learning offers a different approach. Instead of modelling all the forces acting on an object from scratch, these algorithms learn patterns directly from data. Feed them thousands of examples of how objects actually behave in orbit, including all the messy effects, and they learn to make predictions without needing to model each force explicitly.

Early applications focused on object classification. When radar detects something in orbit, is it a large piece of debris, a small satellite, or a cloud of fragments? This isn't just curiosity. Classification determines tracking priority, collision risk, and even legal responsibility.

The algorithms, particularly neural networks designed for image recognition, proved remarkably good at this task. Researchers at institutions including the Air Force Research Laboratory showed that these systems could classify objects from limited data with accuracy matching or exceeding human experts.

The breakthrough came from recognising that radar returns contain patterns these networks excel at detecting. A tumbling rocket body produces characteristic reflections as different surfaces catch the radar beam. A flat solar panel looks different from a cylindrical fuel tank. A dense cluster of fragments has a distinct signature. These patterns are subtle and difficult for humans to categorise consistently, especially when the data is noisy or incomplete. But they're exactly what neural networks were designed to spot.

It's similar to how these same networks can recognise faces in photos. They learn to detect subtle patterns in pixel data that distinguish one person from another. For debris tracking, they learn to detect patterns in radar data that distinguish a rocket body from a satellite bus from a fragment cloud.

The next frontier was trajectory prediction. Researchers began experimenting with neural networks designed to handle sequential data, the kind that tracks how things change over time. These networks could learn the complex patterns of how orbits evolve, including subtle effects that are hard to model explicitly.

Perhaps most crucially, machine learning proved effective at conjunction screening: identifying which objects might come dangerously close to each other. Traditional methods require checking every possible pair. Machine learning can rapidly identify high-risk encounters without computing every single trajectory, dramatically speeding things up.

The Algorithms That Are Changing Orbital Safety

The machine learning techniques being deployed aren't exotic experimental algorithms. They're mostly well-established approaches proven in other domains, now adapted for orbital mechanics.

Object identification: The same neural networks that power facial recognition are being used to identify and classify debris from radar returns. Space debris comes in all shapes: intact rocket bodies, fragmented solar panels, clusters of collision debris. These networks can distinguish between them with over 90 per cent accuracy, even from limited data. This matters because a large, intact rocket body on a predictable orbit is easier to track and avoid than a cloud of small fragments.

Trajectory prediction: Networks designed to understand sequences, like how stock prices change over time, can learn how orbits evolve. Feed them the history of thousands of objects and they learn to predict future positions, capturing effects that are hard to model explicitly.

Atmospheric density at orbital altitudes varies with solar activity, time of day, and location in complex ways. During solar maximum, when the sun is most active, the upper atmosphere heats up and expands, increasing drag on satellites. But predicting exactly how much drag a specific object will experience requires knowing its cross-sectional area, mass, altitude, and the precise atmospheric density at that location and time.

A network trained on years of actual orbital data can learn these patterns without needing explicit atmospheric models. It learns from observation: when solar activity increased by this much, objects at this altitude typically decelerated by this amount. It's not understanding the physics, but it's pattern matching at a level of complexity that would be impractical to model explicitly.

Collision risk assessment: Algorithms that combine multiple decision trees can rapidly estimate collision probability by learning from historical near-misses. They're fast, understandable, and can handle the mix of data types that characterise orbital information.

Manoeuvre planning: Newer approaches use reinforcement learning, the same technique that teaches computers to play chess. When a collision risk is identified, operators must decide whether to manoeuvre, when, and how much. Each manoeuvre affects future collision risks and consumes precious fuel. These algorithms can learn optimal strategies by training on thousands of simulated scenarios.

ESA's CREAM project, the Collision Risk Estimation and Automated Mitigation system, represents one of the most advanced operational deployments of machine learning for debris tracking. Announced in 2025, CREAM uses machine learning algorithms to automate collision risk assessment and recommend avoidance manoeuvres. According to ESA documentation, the system can process conjunction warnings significantly faster than human analysts, enabling more timely decision-making.

The key advantage these algorithms offer isn't superhuman intelligence. It's speed and consistency. A well-trained neural network can classify thousands of objects in seconds, predict trajectories for the entire tracked debris population in minutes, and screen for potential conjunctions continuously. Human analysts simply cannot maintain that pace.

But there's another advantage: consistency under pressure. A human analyst working a 12-hour shift, processing hundreds of conjunction warnings, will get tired. Attention wanders. Mistakes happen. An algorithm processes the 500th conjunction warning with the same careful attention as the first. It doesn't get bored, doesn't get distracted, doesn't decide to cut corners because it's nearly time to go home.

This doesn't mean algorithms are better than humans at everything. Humans excel at recognising unusual situations, applying contextual knowledge, and making judgment calls when data is ambiguous. But for high-volume, repetitive tasks that require sustained attention, algorithms have a clear advantage.

Where the Algorithms Struggle

For all their promise, machine learning algorithms haven't solved the space debris tracking problem. They've just shifted where the difficulties lie.

The first challenge is data. Machine learning needs thousands or millions of examples to learn effectively. For common debris scenarios, such data exists. Decades of tracking have generated vast datasets of observations and near-misses.

But space is full of rare events that matter enormously. What about objects in highly unusual orbits? Debris from a recent anti-satellite test? A satellite tumbling in a novel way? These AI systems learn from past examples. Show them something they've never seen before, and they can fail spectacularly.

A model that's 99 per cent accurate sounds impressive until you realise that one per cent represents hundreds of potentially catastrophic failures when screening tens of thousands of objects daily. Traditional physics-based models have a crucial advantage: they're based on fundamental laws that apply universally. Newton's laws don't suddenly stop working for an unusual orbit. But a neural network trained primarily on low-Earth orbit debris might make nonsensical predictions for objects in very different orbits.

The second challenge is interpretability. When a machine learning model predicts a high collision probability, can it explain why? For some algorithms, you can examine which factors were most important. For deep neural networks with millions of parameters, the reasoning is essentially opaque. It's a black box.

Satellite operators need to understand why they're being asked to manoeuvre. Is the risk real, or is the model seeing patterns that don't exist? For a decision that costs thousands of pounds in fuel and operational disruption, “the algorithm said so” isn't good enough. There's a fundamental trade-off: the most accurate models tend to be the least explainable.

The third challenge is adversarial robustness. Space debris tracking is increasingly geopolitical. What happens when someone deliberately tries to fool your models?

Imagine a satellite designed to mimic the radar signature of benign debris, approaching other satellites undetected. Or spoofed data fed into the tracking system, causing incorrect predictions. This isn't science fiction. Researchers have demonstrated adversarial attacks on image classifiers: add carefully crafted noise to a photo of a panda, and the system confidently identifies it as a gibbon. The noise is imperceptible to humans, but it completely fools the algorithm.

Similar attacks could theoretically target debris tracking systems. An adversary could study how your classification algorithms work, then design satellites or debris to exploit their weaknesses. Make your reconnaissance satellite look like a dead rocket body to tracking algorithms, and you could position it undetected. Feed false observational data into the tracking network, and you could cause operators to waste fuel on phantom threats or ignore real ones.

This is particularly worrying because machine learning models are often deployed with their architectures published in research papers. An adversary doesn't need to hack into your systems; they can just read your publications and design countermeasures.

The fourth challenge is the feedback loop. These models are trained on historical data about how objects moved and collided. But their predictions influence behaviour: satellites manoeuvre to avoid predicted conjunctions. The future data the models see is partially determined by their own predictions.

If a model over-predicts risks, operators perform unnecessary manoeuvres, generating data that might reinforce the model's bias. If it under-predicts, collisions occur that could be misinterpreted as evidence that risks were lower than thought. The model's own deployment changes the data it encounters.

The Hybrid Future: Humans and Machines Together

The most successful approaches to space debris tracking aren't pure machine learning or pure traditional methods. They're hybrids that combine the strengths of both.

Physics-informed neural networks represent one promising direction. These systems incorporate known physical laws directly into their structure. A network predicting orbital trajectories might include constraints ensuring predictions don't violate conservation of energy or momentum.

Think of it as giving the algorithm guardrails. A pure machine learning model might predict that an object suddenly accelerates for no reason, because that pattern appeared in noisy training data. A physics-informed model knows that objects don't spontaneously accelerate in orbit. Energy must be conserved. Angular momentum must be conserved. Any prediction that violates these laws is automatically rejected or penalised during training.

This hybrid approach reduces the training data needed, improves performance on novel situations, and increases trust. The model isn't learning arbitrary patterns; it's learning how to apply physical laws in complex scenarios where traditional methods struggle. Researchers at institutions including the University of Colorado Boulder have demonstrated these hybrids can predict orbits with accuracy approaching traditional methods, but orders of magnitude faster. Speed matters when you need to continuously update predictions for thousands of objects.

Another hybrid approach uses machine learning for rapid screening, then traditional methods for detailed analysis. An algorithm quickly identifies the 100 most worrying conjunctions out of millions, then human analysts examine those high-risk cases in detail.

ESA's CREAM system exemplifies this philosophy. Machine learning automates routine screening, processing conjunction warnings and calculating collision probabilities. But humans make final decisions on manoeuvres. The algorithms handle the impossible task of continuously monitoring thousands of objects; humans provide judgment and accountability.

This division of labour makes sense. Algorithms can rapidly identify that objects A and B will pass within 200 metres with a collision probability of 1 in 5,000. But deciding whether to manoeuvre requires judgment: How reliable is the orbital data? How valuable is the satellite? How much fuel does it have remaining? What are the operational consequences of a manoeuvre? These are questions that benefit from human expertise and contextual understanding.

These systems are also learning to express uncertainty. A model might predict two objects will pass within 500 metres, with confidence that the actual distance will be between 200 and 800 metres. This uncertainty information is crucial: high collision probability with low uncertainty is very different from high probability with high uncertainty.

Some systems use “active learning” to improve themselves efficiently. The algorithm identifies cases where it's most uncertain, requests human expert input on those specific cases, then incorporates that expertise to refine future predictions. Human knowledge gets deployed where it matters most, not wasted on routine cases.

The Race Against Exponential Growth

Here's the uncomfortable reality: even with machine learning, we might be losing the race against debris proliferation.

The debris population isn't static. It's growing. The 2007 Chinese anti-satellite test destroyed the Fengyun-1C weather satellite, creating more than 3,000 trackable fragments and increasing the catalogued population by 25 per cent in a single event. The 2009 collision between Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 generated over 2,300 more.

These are permanent additions to the orbital environment, each capable of triggering further collisions. This is Kessler Syndrome: the point where collisions generate debris faster than atmospheric drag removes it, creating a runaway cascade. We may already be in the early stages.

Here's why this is so insidious. In low Earth orbit, atmospheric drag gradually pulls objects down until they burn up on reentry. But this process is slow. An object at 800 kilometres altitude might take decades to deorbit naturally. At 1,000 kilometres, it could take centuries. During all that time, it's a collision hazard.

If collisions are creating new debris faster than natural decay is removing it, the total population grows. More debris means more collisions. More collisions mean even more debris. It's a runaway feedback loop.

ESA projections suggest that even if all launches stopped tomorrow, the debris population would continue growing through collisions in certain orbital regions. The only way to stabilise things is active debris removal: physically capturing and deorbiting large objects before they collide.

Algorithms make tracking more efficient, but removing debris requires physical missions. Better predictions enable better avoidance manoeuvres, yet every manoeuvre consumes fuel, ultimately shortening satellite lifetimes.

ESA's ClearSpace-1 mission, scheduled to launch in 2025, will attempt the first commercial debris removal by capturing a rocket adapter left in orbit in 2013. This 100-kilogram object is relatively large, in a well-known orbit, with a simple shape. It's a proof of concept, not a scalable solution.

Stabilising the orbital environment would require removing thousands of objects, at a cost running into billions. Machine learning might help identify which debris poses the greatest risk and should be prioritised, but it can't solve the fundamental problem that removal is expensive and difficult.

Meanwhile, launch rates are accelerating. SpaceX alone has launched over 5,000 Starlink satellites, with plans for tens of thousands more. Amazon's Project Kuiper, OneWeb, and Chinese mega-constellations add thousands more.

Each satellite is a potential future debris object. Even with responsible disposal practices, failures happen. Satellites malfunction, deorbit burns fail. Batteries that should be depleted before end-of-life still hold charge and can explode. With thousands being launched, even a small failure rate produces significant debris.

SpaceX has committed to deorbiting Starlink satellites within five years of mission end, and the latest generation is designed to burn up completely on reentry rather than producing fragments. That's responsible behaviour. But enforcing such practices globally, across all operators and countries, is a different challenge entirely.

This creates a tracking burden that grows faster than our capabilities, even with machine learning. The US Space Surveillance Network can track objects down to about 10 centimetres in low Earth orbit. Improving this to track smaller objects would require major infrastructure investments: bigger radars, more sensitive receivers, more powerful optical telescopes, more processing capability.

These systems squeeze more information from existing sensors, predicting more accurately from sparse observations. But they can't observe objects too small for sensors to detect. The 97 per cent we can't currently track remains invisible and dangerous. A one-centimetre bolt moving at 15 kilometres per second doesn't care whether you can track it or not. It'll still punch through a satellite like a bullet through paper.

What Needs to Happen Next

If machine learning is going to meaningfully help, several things need to happen quickly.

Better data sharing: Debris tracking data is fragmented across organisations and countries. The US maintains the most comprehensive catalogue, but Russia, China, and European nations operate independent systems. Machine learning performs best on large, diverse datasets. A global, open debris database aggregating all observations would enable significantly better models.

Purpose-built infrastructure: Current space surveillance systems were designed primarily for tracking operational satellites and monitoring for missile launches. Purpose-built systems optimised for debris would provide better data. This includes improved ground-based radar and optical systems, plus space-based sensors that can observe debris continuously from orbit.

Several companies and agencies are developing space-based space surveillance systems. The advantage is continuous observation: ground-based systems can only see objects when they pass overhead, but a sensor in orbit can track debris continuously in nearby orbital regimes. The US Space Force has deployed satellites for space surveillance. Commercial companies are proposing constellations of debris-tracking satellites. These systems could provide the continuous, high-quality data that machine learning models need to reach their full potential.

Targeted research: We need machine learning research specifically tackling debris tracking challenges: handling sparse, irregular data; quantifying uncertainty in safety-critical predictions; maintaining performance on unusual cases; providing interpretable predictions operators can trust. Academic research tends to focus on clean benchmark problems. Debris tracking is messy and safety-critical.

Stronger regulations: Tracking and prediction algorithms can't prevent irresponsible actors from creating debris through anti-satellite tests or failed disposal. International agreements like the UN Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines exist but aren't binding. Nations can ignore them without consequences.

The 2007 Chinese anti-satellite test, the 2019 Indian anti-satellite test, and the 2021 Russian anti-satellite test all created thousands of trackable fragments. These tests demonstrate capabilities and send political messages, but they also contaminate the orbital environment for everyone. Debris doesn't respect national boundaries. Fragments from the Chinese test still threaten the International Space Station, a multinational facility.

Stronger regulations with actual enforcement mechanisms would reduce new debris generation, buying time for tracking and removal technologies to mature. But achieving international consensus on space regulations is politically fraught, especially when debris-generating activities like anti-satellite tests are seen as demonstrations of military capability.

Sustained funding: Space debris is a tragedy of the commons. Everyone benefits from a clean orbital environment, but individual actors have incentives to launch without fully accounting for debris costs. This requires collective action and sustained investment over decades.

The challenge is that the benefits of debris mitigation are diffuse and long-term, while the costs are concentrated and immediate. Spend billions on improved tracking systems and debris removal, and the benefit is avoiding catastrophic collisions that might happen years or decades from now. It's hard to generate political enthusiasm for preventing hypothetical future disasters, especially when the spending must happen now.

Yet the alternative is grim. Without action, we risk making certain orbital regimes unusable for generations. Low Earth orbit isn't infinite. There are only so many useful orbits at optimal altitudes. Contaminate them with debris, and future generations lose access to space-based services we currently take for granted: satellite communications, GPS navigation, Earth observation for weather forecasting and climate monitoring.

The economic value of the space industry is measured in hundreds of billions annually. Protecting that value requires investment in tracking, mitigation, and removal technologies, with machine learning as a crucial enabling tool.

The Verdict: Necessary but Not Sufficient

Can machine learning solve the space debris tracking problem that overwhelms human analysts? Yes and no.

The technology has made debris tracking more efficient, accurate, and scalable. Algorithms can process vastly more data than humans, identify patterns in complex datasets, and make predictions fast enough for thousands of objects simultaneously. Without these systems, tracking would already be unmanageable. They've transformed an impossible task into something tractable, enabling analysts to focus on high-risk or unusual cases rather than routine processing, whilst making screening fast enough to keep pace with growth.

But this isn't a silver bullet. Current sensors still miss countless objects. Debris already in orbit still needs physical removal. New debris generation continues unchecked. And the technology introduces fresh challenges around data quality, interpretability, robustness, and validation.

The real solution requires algorithmic assistance as part of a broader strategy: better sensors, active debris removal, international cooperation, stronger regulations, sustained investment. We're still racing against exponential growth. We haven't achieved the combination of tracking capability, removal capacity, and prevention needed to stabilise the orbital environment. Better tools are here, but the outcome is far from certain.

The future is hybrid: algorithms and humans working together, each contributing unique strengths to a problem too large for either alone. Machines handle the impossible task of continuous monitoring and rapid screening. Humans provide judgment, accountability, and expertise for the cases that matter most.

It's not as satisfying as a purely technological solution. But it's probably the only approach with a chance of working.


Sources and References

  1. European Space Agency. “About Space Debris.” ESA Space Safety Programme. Accessed October 2025. https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Space_Debris/About_space_debris

  2. European Space Agency. “Space Debris by the Numbers.” ESA Space Debris Office. Accessed October 2025.

  3. European Space Agency. “ESA Commissions World's First Space Debris Removal.” 9 December 2019. https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Space_Debris/ESA_commissions_world_s_first_space_debris_removal

  4. European Space Agency. “CREAM: Avoiding Collisions in Space Through Automation.” 12 August 2025.

  5. NASA Orbital Debris Program Office. Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas. Accessed October 2025. https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov

  6. NASA. “10 Things: What's That Space Rock?” NASA Science. 21 July 2022, updated 5 November 2024.

  7. Union of Concerned Scientists. “UCS Satellite Database.” Updated 1 May 2023. Data current through 1 May 2023. https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/satellite-database

  8. Kessler, D.J., and Cour-Palais, B.G. “Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt.” Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 83, no. A6, 1978, pp. 2637-2646.

  9. United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. “Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.” 2010.

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Tim Green

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Discuss...

When you delete a conversation with ChatGPT, you might reasonably assume that it disappears. Click the rubbish bin icon, confirm your choice, and within 30 days, according to OpenAI's policy, those messages vanish from the company's servers. Except that in 2024, a court order threw this assumption into chaos. OpenAI was forced to retain all ChatGPT logs, including those users believed were permanently deleted. The revelation highlighted an uncomfortable truth: even when we think our data is gone, it might persist in ways we barely understand.

This isn't merely about corporate data retention policies or legal manoeuvres. It's about something more fundamental to how large language models work. These systems don't just process information; they absorb it, encoding fragments of training data into billions of neural network parameters. And once absorbed, that information becomes extraordinarily difficult to extract, even when regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) demand it.

The European Data Protection Board wrestled with this problem throughout 2024, culminating in Opinion 28/2024, a comprehensive attempt to reconcile AI development with data protection law. The board acknowledged what technologists already knew: LLMs present a privacy paradox. They promise personalised, intelligent assistance whilst simultaneously undermining two foundational privacy principles: informed consent and data minimisation.

The Architecture of Remembering

To understand why LLMs create such thorny ethical problems, you need to grasp how they retain information. Unlike traditional databases that store discrete records in retrievable formats, language models encode knowledge as numerical weights distributed across their neural architecture. During training, these models ingest vast datasets scraped from the internet, books, academic papers, and increasingly, user interactions. The learning process adjusts billions of parameters to predict the next word in a sequence, and in doing so, the model inevitably memorises portions of its training data.

In 2021, a team of researchers led by Nicholas Carlini at Google demonstrated just how significant this memorisation could be. Their paper “Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models,” presented at the USENIX Security Symposium, showed that adversaries could recover individual training examples from GPT-2 by carefully querying the model. The researchers extracted hundreds of verbatim text sequences, including personally identifiable information: names, phone numbers, email addresses, IRC conversations, code snippets, and even 128-bit UUIDs. Critically, they found that larger models were more vulnerable than smaller ones, suggesting that as LLMs scale, so does their capacity to remember.

This isn't a bug; it's an intrinsic feature of how neural networks learn. The European Data Protection Board's April 2025 report on AI Privacy Risks and Mitigations for Large Language Models explained that during training, LLMs analyse vast datasets, and if fine-tuned with company-specific or user-generated data, there's a risk of that information being memorised and resurfacing unpredictably. The process creates what researchers call “eidetic memorisation,” where models reproduce training examples with near-perfect fidelity.

But memorisation represents only one dimension of the privacy risk. Recent research has demonstrated that LLMs can also infer sensitive attributes from text without explicitly memorising anything. A May 2024 study published as arXiv preprint 2310.07298, “Beyond Memorization: Violating Privacy Via Inference with Large Language Models,” presented the first comprehensive analysis of pretrained LLMs' capabilities to infer personal attributes from text. The researchers discovered that these models could deduce location, income, and sex with up to 85% top-one accuracy and 95% top-three accuracy. The model doesn't need to have seen your specific data; it leverages statistical patterns learned from millions of training examples to make educated guesses about individuals.

This inferential capability creates a paradox. Even if we could perfectly prevent memorisation, LLMs would still pose privacy risks through their ability to reconstruct probable personal information from contextual clues. It's akin to the difference between remembering your exact address versus deducing your neighbourhood from your accent, the shops you mention, and the weather you describe.

Informed consent rests on a simple premise: individuals should understand what data is being collected, how it will be used, and what risks it entails before agreeing to participate. In data protection law, GDPR Article 6 specifies that in most cases, the only justification for processing personal data is the active and informed consent (opt-in consent) of the data subject.

But how do you obtain informed consent for a system whose data practices are fundamentally opaque? When you interact with ChatGPT, Claude, or any other conversational AI, can you genuinely understand where your words might end up? The answer, according to legal scholars and technologists alike, is: probably not.

The Italian Data Protection Authority became one of the first regulators to scrutinise this issue seriously. Throughout 2024, Italian authorities increasingly examined the extent of user consent when publicly available data is re-purposed for commercial LLMs. The challenge stems from a disconnect between traditional consent frameworks and the reality of modern AI development. When a company scrapes the internet to build a training dataset, it typically doesn't secure individual consent from every person whose words appear in forum posts, blog comments, or social media updates. Instead, developers often invoke “legitimate interest” as a legal basis under GDPR Article 6(1)(f).

The European Data Protection Board's Opinion 28/2024 highlighted divergent national stances on whether broad web scraping for AI training constitutes a legitimate interest. The board urged a case-by-case assessment, but the guidance offered little comfort to individuals concerned about their data. The fundamental problem is that once information enters an LLM's training pipeline, the individual loses meaningful control over it.

Consider the practical mechanics. Even if a company maintains records of its training data sources, which many proprietary systems don't disclose, tracing specific information back to identifiable individuals proves nearly impossible. As a 2024 paper published in the Tsinghua China Law Review noted, in LLMs it is hard to know what personal data is used in training and how to attribute these data to particular individuals. Data subjects can only learn about their personal data by either inspecting the original training datasets, which companies rarely make available, or by prompting the models. But prompting cannot guarantee the outputs contain the full list of information stored in the model weights.

This opacity undermines the core principle of informed consent. How can you consent to something you cannot inspect or verify? The European Data Protection Board acknowledged this problem in Opinion 28/2024, noting that processing personal data to avoid risks of potential biases and errors can be included when this is clearly and specifically identified within the purpose, and the personal data is necessary for that purpose. But the board also emphasised that this necessity must be demonstrable: the processing must genuinely serve the stated purpose and no less intrusive alternative should exist.

Anthropic's approach to consent illustrates the industry's evolving strategy. In 2024, the company announced it would extend data retention to five years for users who allow their data to be used for model training. Users who opt out maintain the standard 30-day retention period. This creates a two-tier system: those who contribute to AI improvement in exchange for extended data storage, and those who prioritise privacy at the cost of potentially less personalised experiences.

OpenAI took a different approach with its Memory feature, rolled out broadly in 2024. The system allows ChatGPT to remember details across conversations, creating a persistent context that improves over time. OpenAI acknowledged that memory brings additional privacy and safety considerations, implementing steering mechanisms to prevent ChatGPT from proactively remembering sensitive information like health details unless explicitly requested. Users can view, delete, or entirely disable the Memory feature, but research conducted in 2024 found that a European audit discovered 63% of ChatGPT user data contained personally identifiable information, with only 22% of users aware of the settings to disable data retention features.

The consent problem deepens when you consider the temporal dimension. LLMs are trained on datasets compiled at specific points in time, often years before the model's public release. Information you posted online in 2018 might appear in a model trained in 2022 and deployed in 2024. Did you consent to that use when you clicked “publish” on your blog six years ago? Legal frameworks struggle to address this temporal gap.

Data Minimisation in an Age of Maximalism

If informed consent presents challenges for LLMs, data minimisation appears nearly incompatible with their fundamental architecture. GDPR Article 5(1)© requires that personal data be “adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed.” Recital 39 clarifies that “personal data should be processed only if the purpose of the processing could not reasonably be fulfilled by other means.”

The UK Information Commissioner's Office guidance on AI and data protection emphasises that organisations must identify the minimum amount of personal data needed to fulfil a purpose and process only that information, no more. Yet the very nature of machine learning relies on ingesting massive amounts of data to train and test algorithms. The European Data Protection Board noted in Opinion 28/2024 that the assessment of necessity entails two elements: whether the processing activity will allow the pursuit of the purpose, and whether there is no less intrusive way of pursuing this purpose.

This creates a fundamental tension. LLM developers argue, with some justification, that model quality correlates strongly with training data volume and diversity. Google's research on differential privacy for language models noted that when you increase the number of training tokens, the LLM's memorisation capacity increases, but so does its general capability. The largest, most capable models like GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini owe their impressive performance partly to training on datasets comprising hundreds of billions or even trillions of tokens.

From a data minimisation perspective, this approach appears maximalist. Do you really need every Reddit comment from the past decade to build an effective language model? Could synthetic data, carefully curated datasets, or anonymised information serve the same purpose? The answer depends heavily on your definition of “necessary” and your tolerance for reduced performance.

Research presented at the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency tackled this question directly. The paper “The Data Minimization Principle in Machine Learning” (arXiv:2405.19471) introduced an optimisation framework for data minimisation based on legal definitions. The researchers demonstrated that techniques such as pseudonymisation and feature selection by importance could help limit the type and volume of processed personal data. The key insight was to document which data points actually contribute to model performance and discard the rest.

But this assumes you can identify relevant versus irrelevant data before training, which LLMs' unsupervised learning approach makes nearly impossible. You don't know which fragments of text will prove crucial until after the model has learned from them. It's like asking an architect to design a building using the minimum necessary materials before understanding the structure's requirements.

Cross-session data retention exacerbates the minimisation challenge. Modern conversational AI systems increasingly maintain context across interactions. If previous conversation states, memory buffers, or hidden user context aren't carefully managed or sanitised, sensitive information can reappear in later responses, bypassing initial privacy safeguards. This architectural choice, whilst improving user experience, directly contradicts data minimisation's core principle: collect and retain only what's immediately necessary.

Furthermore, recent research on privacy attacks against LLMs suggests that even anonymised training data might be vulnerable. A 2024 paper on membership inference attacks against fine-tuned large language models demonstrated that the SPV-MIA method raises the AUC of membership inference attacks from 0.7 to 0.9. These attacks determine whether a specific data point was part of the training dataset by querying the model and analysing confidence scores. If an attacker can infer dataset membership, they can potentially reverse-engineer personal information even from supposedly anonymised training data.

The Right to Erasure Meets Immutable Models

Perhaps no single GDPR provision highlights the LLM consent and minimisation challenge more starkly than Article 17, the “right to erasure” or “right to be forgotten.” The regulation grants individuals the right to obtain erasure of personal data concerning them without undue delay, which legal commentators generally interpret as approximately one month.

For traditional databases, compliance is straightforward: locate the relevant records and delete them. Search engines developed mature technical solutions for removing links to content. But LLMs present an entirely different challenge. A comprehensive survey published in 2024 as arXiv preprint 2307.03941, “Right to be Forgotten in the Era of Large Language Models: Implications, Challenges, and Solutions,” catalogued the obstacles.

The core technical problem stems from model architecture. Once trained, model parameters encapsulate information learned during training, making it difficult to remove specific data points without retraining the entire model. Engineers acknowledge that the only way to completely remove an individual's data is to retrain the model from scratch, an impractical solution. Training a large language model may take months and consume millions of pounds worth of computational resources, far exceeding the “undue delay” permitted by GDPR.

Alternative approaches exist but carry significant limitations. Machine unlearning techniques attempt to make models “forget” specific data points without full retraining. The most prominent framework, SISA (Sharded, Isolated, Sliced, and Aggregated) training, was introduced by Bourtoule and colleagues in 2019. SISA partitions training data into isolated shards and trains an ensemble of constituent models, saving intermediate checkpoints after processing each data slice. When unlearning a data point, only the affected constituent model needs reverting to a prior state and partial retraining on a small fraction of data.

This mechanism provides exact unlearning guarantees whilst offering significant efficiency gains over full retraining. Research showed that sharding alone speeds up the retraining process by 3.13 times on the Purchase dataset and 1.66 times on the Street View House Numbers dataset, with additional acceleration through slicing.

But SISA and similar approaches require forethought. You must design your training pipeline with unlearning in mind from the beginning, which most existing LLMs did not do. Retrofitting SISA to already-trained models proves impossible. Alternative techniques like model editing, guardrails, and unlearning layers show promise in research settings but remain largely unproven at the scale of commercial LLMs.

The challenge extends beyond technical feasibility. Even if efficient unlearning were possible, identifying what to unlearn poses its own problem. Training datasets are sometimes not disclosed, especially proprietary ones, and prompting trained models cannot guarantee the outputs contain the full list of information stored in the model weights.

Then there's the hallucination problem. LLMs frequently generate plausible-sounding information that doesn't exist in their training data, synthesised from statistical patterns. Removing hallucinated information becomes paradoxically challenging since it was never in the training dataset to begin with. How do you forget something the model invented?

The legal-technical gap continues to widen. Although the European Data Protection Board ruled that AI developers can be considered data controllers under GDPR, the regulation lacks clear guidelines for enforcing erasure within AI systems. Companies can argue, with some technical justification, that constraints make compliance impossible. This creates a regulatory stalemate: the law demands erasure, but the technology cannot deliver it without fundamental architectural changes.

Differential Privacy

Faced with these challenges, researchers and companies have increasingly turned to differential privacy as a potential remedy. The technique, formalised in 2006, allows systems to train machine learning models whilst rigorously guaranteeing that the learned model respects the privacy of its training data by injecting carefully calibrated noise into the training process.

The core insight of differential privacy is that by adding controlled randomness, you can ensure that an observer cannot determine whether any specific individual's data was included in the training set. The privacy guarantee is mathematical and formal: the probability of any particular output changes only minimally whether or not a given person's data is present.

For language models, the standard approach employs DP-SGD (Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent). During training, the algorithm clips gradients to bound each example's influence and adds Gaussian noise to the aggregated gradients before updating model parameters. Google Research demonstrated this approach with VaultGemma, which the company described as the world's most capable differentially private LLM. VaultGemma 1B shows no detectable memorisation of its training data, successfully demonstrating DP training's efficacy.

But differential privacy introduces a fundamental trade-off between privacy and utility. The noise required to guarantee privacy degrades model performance. Google researchers found that when you apply standard differential privacy optimisation techniques like DP-SGD to train large language models, the performance ends up much worse than non-private models because the noise added for privacy protection tends to scale with the model size.

Recent advances have mitigated this trade-off somewhat. Research published in 2024 (arXiv:2407.07737) on “Fine-Tuning Large Language Models with User-Level Differential Privacy” introduced improved techniques. User-level DP, a stronger form of privacy, guarantees that an attacker using a model cannot learn whether the user's data is included in the training dataset. The researchers found that their ULS approach performs significantly better in settings where either strong privacy guarantees are required or the compute budget is large.

Google also developed methods for generating differentially private synthetic data, creating entirely artificial data that has the key characteristics of the original whilst offering strong privacy protection. This approach shows promise for scenarios where organisations need to share datasets for research or development without exposing individual privacy.

Yet differential privacy, despite its mathematical elegance, doesn't solve the consent and minimisation problems. It addresses the symptom (privacy leakage) rather than the cause (excessive data collection and retention). A differentially private LLM still trains on massive datasets, still potentially incorporates data without explicit consent, and still resists targeted erasure. The privacy guarantee applies to the aggregate statistical properties, not to individual autonomy and control.

Moreover, differential privacy makes implicit assumptions about data structure that do not hold for the majority of natural language data. A 2022 ACM paper, “What Does it Mean for a Language Model to Preserve Privacy?” highlighted this limitation. Text contains rich, interconnected personal information that doesn't fit neatly into the independent data points that differential privacy theory assumes.

Regulatory Responses and Industry Adaptation

Regulators worldwide have begun grappling with these challenges, though approaches vary significantly. The European Union's AI Act, which entered into force in August 2024 with phased implementation, represents the most comprehensive legislative attempt to govern AI systems, including language models.

Under the AI Act, transparency is defined as AI systems being developed and used in a way that allows appropriate traceability and explainability, whilst making humans aware that they communicate or interact with an AI system. For general-purpose AI models, which include large language models, specific transparency and copyright-related rules became effective in August 2025.

Providers of general-purpose AI models must draw up and keep up-to-date technical documentation containing a description of the model development process, including details around training and testing. The European Commission published a template to help providers summarise the data used to train their models. Additionally, companies must inform users when they are interacting with an AI system, unless it's obvious, and AI systems that create synthetic content must mark their outputs as artificially generated.

But transparency, whilst valuable, doesn't directly address consent and minimisation. Knowing that an AI system trained on your data doesn't give you the power to prevent that training or demand erasure after the fact. A 2024 paper presented at the Pan-Hellenic Conference on Computing and Informatics acknowledged that transparency raises immense challenges for LLM developers due to the intrinsic black-box nature of these models.

The GDPR and AI Act create overlapping but not identical regulatory frameworks. Organisations developing LLMs in the EU must comply with both, navigating data protection principles alongside AI-specific transparency and risk management requirements. The European Data Protection Board's Opinion 28/2024 attempted to clarify how these requirements apply to AI models, but many questions remain unresolved.

Industry responses have varied. OpenAI's enterprise privacy programme offers Zero Data Retention (ZDR) options for API users with qualifying use cases. Under ZDR, inputs and outputs are removed from OpenAI's systems immediately after processing, providing a clearer minimisation pathway for business customers. However, the court-ordered data retention affecting consumer ChatGPT users demonstrates the fragility of these commitments when legal obligations conflict.

Anthropic's tiered retention model, offering 30-day retention for users who opt out of data sharing versus five-year retention for those who opt in, represents an attempt to align business needs with user preferences. But this creates its own ethical tension: users who most value privacy receive less personalised service, whilst those willing to sacrifice privacy for functionality subsidise model improvement for everyone.

The challenge extends to enforcement. Data protection authorities lack the technical tools and expertise to verify compliance claims. How can a regulator confirm that an LLM has truly forgotten specific training examples? Auditing these systems requires capabilities that few governmental bodies possess. This enforcement gap allows a degree of regulatory theatre, where companies make compliance claims that are difficult to substantively verify.

The Broader Implications

The technical and regulatory challenges surrounding LLM consent and data minimisation reflect deeper questions about the trajectory of AI development. We're building increasingly powerful systems whose capabilities emerge from the ingestion and processing of vast information stores. This architectural approach creates fundamental tensions with privacy frameworks designed for an era of discrete, identifiable data records.

Research into privacy attacks continues to reveal new vulnerabilities. Work on model inversion attacks demonstrates that adversaries could reverse-engineer private images used during training by updating input images and observing changes in output probabilities. A comprehensive survey from November 2024 (arXiv:2411.10023), “Model Inversion Attacks: A Survey of Approaches and Countermeasures,” catalogued the evolving landscape of these threats.

Studies also show that privacy risks are not evenly distributed. Research has found that minority groups often experience higher privacy leakage, attributed to models tending to memorise more about smaller subgroups. This raises equity concerns: the populations already most vulnerable to surveillance and data exploitation face amplified risks from AI systems.

The consent and minimisation problems also intersect with broader questions of AI alignment and control. If we cannot effectively specify what data an LLM should and should not retain, how can we ensure these systems behave in accordance with human values more generally? The inability to implement precise data governance suggests deeper challenges in achieving fine-grained control over AI behaviour.

Some researchers argue that we need fundamentally different approaches to AI development. Rather than training ever-larger models on ever-more-expansive datasets, perhaps we should prioritise architectures that support granular data management, selective forgetting, and robust attribution. This might mean accepting performance trade-offs in exchange for better privacy properties, a proposition that faces resistance in a competitive landscape where capability often trumps caution.

The economic incentives cut against privacy-preserving approaches. Companies that accumulate the largest datasets and build the most capable models gain competitive advantages, creating pressure to maximise data collection rather than minimise it. User consent becomes a friction point to be streamlined rather than a meaningful check on corporate power.

Yet the costs of this maximalist approach are becoming apparent. Privacy harms from data breaches, unauthorised inference, and loss of individual autonomy accumulate. Trust in AI systems erodes as users realise the extent to which their information persists beyond their control. Regulatory backlash intensifies, threatening innovation with blunt instruments when nuanced governance mechanisms remain underdeveloped.

If the current trajectory proves unsustainable, what alternatives exist? Several technical and governance approaches show promise, though none offers a complete solution.

Enhanced transparency represents a minimal baseline. Organisations should provide clear, accessible documentation of what data they collect, how long they retain it, what models they train, and what risks users face. The European Commission's documentation templates for AI Act compliance move in this direction, but truly informed consent requires going further. Users need practical tools to inspect what information about them might be embedded in models, even if perfect visibility remains impossible.

Consent mechanisms need fundamental rethinking. The binary choice between “agree to everything” and “don't use the service” fails to respect autonomy. Granular consent frameworks, allowing users to specify which types of data processing they accept and which they reject, could provide more meaningful control. Some researchers propose “consent as a service” platforms that help individuals manage their data permissions across multiple AI systems.

On the minimisation front, organisations could adopt privacy-by-design principles more rigorously. This means architecting systems from the ground up to collect only necessary data, implementing retention limits, and ensuring genuine deletability. SISA-style approaches to training, whilst requiring upfront investment, enable more credible compliance with erasure requests. Synthetic data generation, differential privacy, and federated learning all merit broader deployment despite their current limitations.

Regulatory frameworks require refinement. The GDPR's principles remain sound, but their application to AI systems needs clearer guidance. The European Data Protection Board's ongoing work to clarify AI-specific requirements helps, but questions around legitimate interest, necessity assessments, and technical feasibility standards need more definitive answers. International coordination could prevent a race to the bottom where companies jurisdiction-shop for the most permissive regulations.

Enforcement mechanisms must evolve. Data protection authorities need enhanced technical capacity to audit AI systems, verify compliance claims, and detect violations. This might require specialised AI audit teams, standardised testing protocols, and stronger whistleblower protections. Meaningful penalties for non-compliance, consistently applied, would shift incentive structures.

Fundamentally, though, addressing the LLM consent and minimisation challenge requires confronting uncomfortable questions about AI development priorities. Do we truly need models trained on the entirety of human written expression? Can we achieve valuable AI capabilities through more targeted, consensual data practices? What performance trade-offs should we accept in exchange for stronger privacy protections?

These questions have no purely technical answers. They involve value judgements about individual rights, collective benefits, commercial interests, and the kind of society we want to build. The fact that large language models retain inaccessible traces of prior user interactions does undermine informed consent and the ethical principle of data minimisation as currently understood. But whether this represents an acceptable cost, a surmountable challenge, or a fundamental flaw depends on what we prioritise.

The Path Forward

Standing at this crossroads, the AI community faces a choice. One path continues the current trajectory: building ever-larger models on ever-more-comprehensive datasets, managing privacy through patchwork technical measures and reactive compliance, accepting that consent and minimisation are aspirational rather than achievable. This path delivers capability but erodes trust.

The alternative path requires fundamental rethinking. It means prioritising privacy-preserving architectures even when they limit performance. It means developing AI systems that genuinely forget when asked. It means treating consent as a meaningful constraint rather than a legal formality. It means accepting that some data, even if technically accessible, should remain off-limits.

The choice isn't between privacy and progress. It's between different visions of progress: one that measures success purely in model capability and commercial value, versus one that balances capability with accountability, control, and respect for individual autonomy.

Large language models have demonstrated remarkable potential to augment human intelligence, creativity, and productivity. But their current architecture fundamentally conflicts with privacy principles that society has deemed important enough to enshrine in law. Resolving this conflict will require technical innovation, regulatory clarity, and above all, honest acknowledgement of the trade-offs we face.

The inaccessible traces that LLMs retain aren't merely a technical quirk to be optimised away. They're a consequence of foundational design decisions that prioritise certain values over others. Informed consent and data minimisation might seem antiquated in an age of billion-parameter models, but they encode important insights about power, autonomy, and the conditions necessary for trust.

Whether we can build genuinely consent-respecting, privacy-minimising AI systems that still deliver transformative capabilities remains an open question. But the answer will determine not just the future of language models, but the future of our relationship with artificial intelligence more broadly. The machines remember everything. The question is whether we'll remember why that matters.


Sources and References

Academic Papers and Research

  1. Carlini, N., Tramèr, F., Wallace, E., Jagielski, M., Herbert-Voss, A., Lee, K., Roberts, A., Brown, T., Song, D., Erlingsson, Ú., Oprea, A., and Raffel, C. (2021). “Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models.” 30th USENIX Security Symposium. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/presentation/carlini-extracting

  2. Bourtoule, L., et al. (2019). “Machine Unlearning.” Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. (Referenced for SISA framework)

  3. “Beyond Memorization: Violating Privacy Via Inference with Large Language Models” (2024). arXiv:2310.07298.

  4. “The Data Minimization Principle in Machine Learning” (2025). arXiv:2405.19471. Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency.

  5. “Right to be Forgotten in the Era of Large Language Models: Implications, Challenges, and Solutions” (2024). arXiv:2307.03941.

  6. “Fine-Tuning Large Language Models with User-Level Differential Privacy” (2024). arXiv:2407.07737.

  7. “Practical Membership Inference Attacks against Fine-tuned Large Language Models via Self-prompt Calibration” (2024). arXiv:2311.06062.

  8. “Model Inversion Attacks: A Survey of Approaches and Countermeasures” (2024). arXiv:2411.10023.

  9. “On protecting the data privacy of Large Language Models (LLMs) and LLM agents: A literature review” (2025). ScienceDirect.

  10. “What Does it Mean for a Language Model to Preserve Privacy?” (2022). ACM FAccT Conference.

  11. “Enhancing Transparency in Large Language Models to Meet EU AI Act Requirements” (2024). Proceedings of the 28th Pan-Hellenic Conference on Progress in Computing and Informatics.

Regulatory Documents and Official Guidance

  1. European Data Protection Board. “Opinion 28/2024 on certain data protection aspects related to the processing of personal data in the context of AI models.” December 2024. https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2024-12/edpb_opinion_202428_ai-models_en.pdf

  2. European Data Protection Board. “AI Privacy Risks & Mitigations – Large Language Models (LLMs).” April 2025. https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2025-04/ai-privacy-risks-and-mitigations-in-llms.pdf

  3. Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (General Data Protection Regulation).

  4. Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (EU AI Act).

  5. UK Information Commissioner's Office. “How should we assess security and data minimisation in AI?” https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/artificial-intelligence/guidance-on-ai-and-data-protection/how-should-we-assess-security-and-data-minimisation-in-ai/

  6. Irish Data Protection Commission. “AI, Large Language Models and Data Protection.” 18 July 2024. https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/dpc-guidance/blogs/AI-LLMs-and-Data-Protection

Corporate Documentation and Official Statements

  1. OpenAI. “Memory and new controls for ChatGPT.” https://openai.com/index/memory-and-new-controls-for-chatgpt/

  2. OpenAI. “How we're responding to The New York Times' data demands in order to protect user privacy.” https://openai.com/index/response-to-nyt-data-demands/

  3. OpenAI Help Center. “Chat and File Retention Policies in ChatGPT.” https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8983778-chat-and-file-retention-policies-in-chatgpt

  4. Anthropic Privacy Center. “How long do you store my data?” https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023548-how-long-do-you-store-my-data

  5. Anthropic. “Updates to Consumer Terms and Privacy Policy.” https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms

  6. Google Research Blog. “VaultGemma: The world's most capable differentially private LLM.” https://research.google/blog/vaultgemma-the-worlds-most-capable-differentially-private-llm/

  7. Google Research Blog. “Fine-tuning LLMs with user-level differential privacy.” https://research.google/blog/fine-tuning-llms-with-user-level-differential-privacy/


Tim Green

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Discuss...

When Jason Allen submitted “Théâtre D'opéra Spatial” to the Colorado State Fair's digital art competition in August 2022, he wasn't anticipating a cultural reckoning. The piece, a sprawling, operatic vision of robed figures in a cosmic cathedral, won first prize in the “Digital Arts / Digitally-Manipulated Photography” category. Allen collected his $300 prize and blue ribbon, satisfied that he'd made his point.

Then the internet found out he'd created it using Midjourney, an artificial intelligence text-to-image generator.

“We're watching the death of artistry unfold right before our eyes,” one person wrote on Twitter. Another declared it “so gross.” Within days, Allen's win had sparked a furious debate that continues to reverberate through creative communities worldwide. The controversy wasn't simply about whether AI-generated images constitute “real art”: it was about what happens when algorithmic tools trained on billions of scraped images enter the communal spaces where human creativity has traditionally flourished.

“I won, and I didn't break any rules,” Allen told The New York Times in September 2022, defending his submission. But the backlash suggested that something more profound than rule-breaking was at stake. What Allen had inadvertently revealed was a deepening fracture in how we understand creative labour, artistic ownership, and the future of collaborative cultural production.

More than two years later, that fracture has widened into a chasm. Generative AI tools (systems like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, DALL-E 2, and their proliferating descendants) have moved from experimental novelty to ubiquitous presence. They've infiltrated makerspaces, artist collectives, community art programmes, and local cultural institutions. And in doing so, they've forced an urgent reckoning with fundamental questions: Who owns creativity when machines can generate it? What happens to communal artistic practice when anyone with a text prompt can produce gallery-worthy images in seconds? And can local cultural production survive when the tools transforming it are trained on the uncompensated labour of millions of artists?

The Technical Reality

To understand generative AI's impact on community creativity, one must first grasp how these systems actually work, and why that mechanism matters immensely to working artists.

Text-to-image AI generators like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are built through a process called “diffusion,” which trains neural networks on enormous datasets of images paired with text descriptions. Stable Diffusion, released publicly by Stability AI in August 2022, was trained on a subset of the LAION-5B dataset: a collection of 5.85 billion image-text pairs scraped from across the internet.

The training process is technically sophisticated but conceptually straightforward: the AI analyses millions of images, learning to recognise patterns, styles, compositional techniques, and visual relationships. When a user types a prompt like “Victorian street scene at dusk, oil painting style,” the system generates an image by reversing a noise-adding process, gradually constructing visual information that matches the learned patterns associated with those descriptive terms.

Crucially, these models don't store actual copies of training images. Instead, they encode mathematical representations of visual patterns gleaned from those images. This technical distinction lies at the heart of ongoing legal battles over copyright infringement, a distinction that many artists find unconvincing.

“This thing wants our jobs, it's actively anti-artist,” digital artist RJ Palmer wrote in August 2022, articulating what thousands of creative professionals were feeling. The concern wasn't abstract: AI image generators could demonstrably replicate the distinctive styles of specific living artists, sometimes with unsettling accuracy.

When Stability AI announced Stable Diffusion's public release in August 2022, company founder Emad Mostaque described it as trained on “100,000GB of images” gathered from the web. The model's capabilities were immediately stunning and immediately controversial. Artists discovered their work had been incorporated into training datasets without consent, knowledge, or compensation. Some found that typing their own names into these generators produced images mimicking their signature styles, as if decades of artistic development had been compressed into a prompt-accessible aesthetic filter.

The artistic community's response escalated from online outrage to coordinated legal action with remarkable speed. On 13 January 2023, three artists (Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz) filed a class-action lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, alleging copyright infringement on a massive scale.

The lawsuit, filed by lawyer Matthew Butterick and the Joseph Saveri Law Firm, claims these companies “infringed the rights of millions of artists” by training AI systems on billions of images “without the consent of the original artists.” The complaint characterises AI image generators as sophisticated collage tools that “store compressed copies of training images” and then “recombine” them, a technical characterisation that experts have disputed but which captures the plaintiffs' fundamental grievance.

“This isn't just about three artists,” Butterick wrote in announcing the suit. “It's about whether AI development will honour the rights of creators or steamroll them.”

Getty Images escalated the conflict further, filing suit against Stability AI in London's High Court in January 2023. The stock photo agency alleged that Stability AI “unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright... to the detriment of the content creators.” Getty CEO Craig Peters told the BBC the company believed “content owners should have a say in how their work is used,” framing the lawsuit as defending photographers' and illustrators' livelihoods.

These legal battles have forced courts to grapple with applying decades-old copyright law to technologies that didn't exist when those statutes were written. In the United States, the question hinges largely on whether training AI models on copyrighted images constitutes “fair use”: a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without permission for purposes like criticism, commentary, or research.

“For hundreds of years, human artists learned by copying the art of their predecessors,” noted Patrick Goold, a reader in law at City, University of London, when commenting on the lawsuits to the BBC. “Furthermore, at no point in history has the law sanctioned artists for copying merely an artistic style. The question before the US courts today is whether to abandon these long-held principles in relation to AI-generated images.”

That question remains unresolved as of October 2025, with lawsuits proceeding through courts on both sides of the Atlantic. The outcomes will profoundly shape how generative AI intersects with creative communities, determining whether these tools represent legal innovation or industrial-scale infringement.

The Cultural Institutions Respond

While legal battles unfold, cultural institutions have begun tentatively exploring how generative AI might fit within their missions to support and showcase artistic practice. The results have been mixed, revealing deep tensions within the art world about algorithmic creativity's legitimacy and value.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has integrated AI-generated works into its programming, though with careful contextualisation. In September 2025, MoMA debuted “Sasha Stiles: A LIVING POEM” in its galleries, a generative language system that combines Stiles' original poetry, fragments from MoMA's text-art collection, p5.js code, and GPT-4 to create evolving poetic works. The installation, which incorporates music by Kris Bone, represents MoMA's measured approach to AI art: highlighting works where human creativity shapes and directs algorithmic processes, rather than simply prompt-based image generation.

Other institutions have been more cautious. Many galleries and museums have declined to exhibit AI-generated works, citing concerns about authenticity, artistic intentionality, and the ethical implications of systems trained on potentially pirated material. The hesitancy reflects broader uncertainty about how to evaluate AI-generated work within traditional curatorial frameworks developed for human-created art.

“We're still working out what questions to ask,” one curator at a major metropolitan museum told colleagues privately, speaking on condition of anonymity. “How do we assess aesthetic merit when the 'artist' is partly a system trained on millions of other people's images? What does artistic voice mean in that context? These aren't just technical questions; they're philosophical ones about what art fundamentally is.”

Cultural institutions that support community-based art-making have faced even thornier dilemmas. Organisations receiving public funding from bodies like the National Endowment for the Arts or the Knight Foundation must navigate tensions between supporting artistic innovation and ensuring their grants don't inadvertently undermine the livelihoods of the artists they exist to serve.

The Knight Foundation, which has invested hundreds of millions in arts and culture across American communities since 1950, has largely steered clear of funding AI-focused art projects as of 2025, instead continuing to emphasise support for human artists, cultural spaces, and traditional creative practices. Similarly, the NEA has maintained its focus on supporting individual artists and nonprofit organisations engaged in human-led creative work, though the agency continues researching AI's impacts on creative industries.

Some community arts organisations have attempted to stake out middle ground positions. Creative Capital, a New York-based nonprofit that has supported innovative artists with funding and professional development since 1999, has neither embraced nor rejected AI tools outright. Instead, the organisation continues evaluating proposals based on artistic merit and the artist's creative vision, regardless of whether that vision incorporates algorithmic elements. This pragmatic approach reflects the complexity facing arts funders: how to remain open to genuine innovation whilst not inadvertently accelerating the displacement of human creative labour that such organisations exist to support.

The Grassroots Resistance

While institutions have proceeded cautiously, working artists (particularly those in illustration, concept art, and digital creative fields) have mounted increasingly organised resistance to generative AI's encroachment on their professional territories.

ArtStation, a popular online portfolio platform used by digital artists worldwide, became a flashpoint in late 2022 when it launched “DreamUp,” its own AI image generation tool. The backlash was swift and furious. Artists flooded the platform with images protesting AI-generated art, many featuring variations of “No AI Art” or “#NoToAI” slogans. Some began watermarking their portfolios with anti-AI messages. Others left the platform entirely.

The protests revealed a community in crisis. For many digital artists, ArtStation represented more than just a portfolio hosting service. It was a professional commons, a place where illustrators, concept artists, and digital painters could showcase their work, connect with potential clients, and participate in a community of practice. The platform's decision to introduce an AI generator felt like a betrayal, transforming a space dedicated to celebrating human creativity into one that potentially undermined it.

“We're being put out of work by machines trained on our own labour,” one illustrator posted during the ArtStation protests. “It's not innovation. It's theft with extra steps.”

The protest movement extended beyond online platforms. Artists organised petition drives, wrote open letters to AI companies, and sought media attention to publicise their concerns. Some formed collectives specifically to resist AI encroachment on creative labour, sharing information about which clients were replacing human artists with AI generation and coordinating collective responses to industry developments.

These efforts faced significant challenges. Unlike traditional labour organising, where workers can withhold their labour as leverage, visual artists working in dispersed, freelance arrangements had limited collective power. They couldn't strike against AI companies who had already scraped their work. They couldn't picket internet platforms that hosted training datasets. The infrastructure enabling generative AI operated at scales and through mechanisms that traditional protest tactics struggled to address.

Beyond protest, some artists and technologists attempted to create alternative systems that might address the consent and compensation issues plaguing existing AI tools. In 2022, musicians Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, both pioneers in experimental electronic music and AI-assisted composition, helped launch Spawning AI and its associated tools “Have I Been Trained?” and “Source.Plus.” These platforms aimed to give artists more control over whether their work could be used in AI training datasets.

Herndon and Dryhurst brought unique perspectives to the challenge. Both had experimented extensively with AI in their own creative practices, using machine learning systems to analyse and generate musical compositions. They understood the creative potential of these technologies whilst remaining acutely aware of their implications for artistic labour and autonomy. Their initiatives represented an attempt to chart a middle path: acknowledging AI's capabilities whilst insisting on artists' right to consent and control.

The “Have I Been Trained?” tool allowed artists to search the LAION dataset to see if their work had been included in the training data for Stable Diffusion and other models. For many artists, using the tool was a sobering experience, revealing that hundreds or thousands of their images had been scraped and incorporated into systems they hadn't consented to and from which they received no compensation.

However, these opt-out tools faced inherent limitations. By the time they launched, most major AI models had already been trained: the datasets compiled, the patterns extracted, the knowledge embedded in billions of neural network parameters. Allowing artists to remove future works from future datasets couldn't undo the training that had already occurred. It was, critics noted, rather like offering to lock the stable door after the algorithmic horses had bolted.

Moreover, the opt-out approach placed the burden on individual artists to police the use of their work across the vast, distributed systems of the internet. For working artists already stretched thin by professional demands, adding dataset monitoring to their responsibilities was often impractical. The asymmetry was stark: AI companies could scrape and process billions of images with automated systems, whilst artists had to manually search databases and submit individual opt-out requests.

As of October 2025, the Spawning AI platforms remain under maintenance, their websites displaying messages about “hacking the mainframe”, a perhaps unintentionally apt metaphor for the difficulty of imposing human control on systems already unleashed into the wild. The challenges Herndon and Dryhurst encountered illustrate a broader problem: technological solutions to consent and compensation require cooperation from the AI companies whose business models depend on unrestricted access to training data. Without regulatory requirements or legal obligations, such cooperation remains voluntary and therefore uncertain.

The Transformation of Collaborative Practice

Here's what's getting lost in the noise about copyright and compensation: generative AI isn't just changing how individual artists work. It's rewiring the fundamental dynamics of how communities create art together.

Traditional community art-making runs on shared human labour, skill exchange, and collective decision-making. You bring the painting skills, I'll handle sculpture, someone else offers design ideas. The creative process itself becomes the community builder. Diego Rivera's collaborative murals. The community arts movement of the 1960s and 70s. In every case, the value wasn't just the finished artwork. It was the process. Working together. Creating something that embodied shared values.

Now watch what generative AI does to that equation.

Anyone with a text prompt can generate intricate illustrations. A community group planning a mural no longer needs to recruit a painter. They can generate design options and select preferred directions entirely through algorithmic means.

Yes, this democratises visual expression. Disability activists have noted that AI generation tools enable creative participation for people whose physical abilities might limit traditional art-making. New forms of access.

But here's the problem: this “democratisation” potentially undermines the collaborative necessity that has historically brought diverse community members together around shared creative projects. If each person can generate their own complete visions independently, what incentive exists to engage in the messy, time-consuming work of collaborative creation? What happens when the artistic process becomes solitary prompt-crafting rather than collective creation?

Consider a typical community mural project before generative AI. Professional artists, local residents, young people, elders, all brought together. Early stages involved conversations. What should the mural represent? What stories should it tell? What aesthetic traditions should it draw upon? These conversations themselves built understanding across differences. Participants shared perspectives. Negotiated competing visions.

The actual painting process provided further opportunities for collaboration and skill-sharing. Experienced artists mentoring newcomers. Residents learning techniques. Everyone contributing labour to the project's realisation.

When algorithmic tools enter this space, they risk transforming genuine collaboration into consultation exercises. Community members provide input (in the form of prompts or aesthetic preferences) that professionals then render into finished works using AI generators. The distinction might seem subtle. But it fundamentally alters the social dynamics and community-building functions of collaborative art-making. Instead of hands-on collaborative creation, participants review AI-generated options and vote on preferences. That's closer to market research than creative collaboration.

This shift carries particular weight for how community art projects create local ownership and investment. When residents physically paint a community mural, their labour is literally embedded in the work. They've spent hours or days creating something tangible that represents their community. Deep personal and collective investment in the finished piece. An AI-generated mural, regardless of how carefully community input shaped the prompts, lacks this dimension of embodied labour and direct creative participation.

Some organisations are attempting to integrate AI tools whilst preserving collaborative human creativity. One strategy: using AI generation during early conceptual phases whilst maintaining human creative labour for final execution. Generate dozens of AI images to explore compositional approaches. Use these outputs as springboards for discussion. But ultimately create the final mural through traditional collaborative painting.

Musicians Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst have explored similar territory. Their Holly+ project, launched in 2021, created a digital instrument trained on Herndon's voice that other artists could use with permission. The approach deliberately centred collaboration and consent, demonstrating how AI tools might augment rather than replace human creative partnership.

These examples suggest possible paths forward. But they face constant economic pressure. As AI-generated content becomes cheaper and faster, institutions operating under tight budgets face strong incentives to rely more heavily on algorithmic generation. The risk? A gradual hollowing out of community creative practice. Social and relationship-building dimensions sacrificed for efficiency and cost savings.

The Environmental and Ethical Shadows

Beyond questions of copyright, consent, and creative labour lie deeper concerns about generative AI's environmental costs and ethical implications: issues with particular resonance for communities thinking about sustainable cultural production.

Training large AI models requires enormous computational resources, consuming vast amounts of electricity and generating substantial carbon emissions. While precise figures for specific models remain difficult to verify, researchers have documented that training a single large language model can emit as much carbon as several cars over their entire lifetimes. Image generation models require similar computational intensity.

For communities and institutions committed to environmental sustainability (a growing priority in arts and culture sectors), the carbon footprint of AI-generated art raises uncomfortable questions. Does creating images through energy-intensive computational processes align with values of environmental responsibility? How do we weigh the creative possibilities of AI against its environmental impacts?

These concerns intersect with broader ethical questions about how AI systems encode and reproduce social biases. Models trained on internet-scraped data inevitably absorb and can amplify the biases, stereotypes, and problematic representations present in their training material. Early versions of AI image generators notoriously struggled with accurately and respectfully representing diverse human faces, body types, and cultural contexts, producing results that ranged from awkwardly homogenised to explicitly offensive.

While newer models have improved in this regard through better training data and targeted interventions, the fundamental challenge remains: AI systems trained predominantly on Western, English-language internet content tend to encode Western aesthetic norms and cultural perspectives as default. For communities using these tools to create culturally specific artwork or represent local identity and history, this bias presents serious limitations.

Moreover, the concentration of AI development in a handful of well-resourced technology companies raises questions about cultural autonomy and self-determination. When the algorithmic tools shaping visual culture are created by companies in Silicon Valley, what happens to local and regional creative traditions? How do communities preserve distinctive aesthetic practices when powerful, convenient tools push toward algorithmically optimised homogeneity?

The Uncertain Future

As of October 2025, generative AI's impact on community creativity, collaborative art, and local cultural production remains contested and in flux. Different scenarios seem possible, depending on how ongoing legal battles, technological developments, and cultural negotiations unfold.

In one possible future, legal and regulatory frameworks evolve to establish clearer boundaries around AI training data and generated content. Artists gain meaningful control over whether their work can be used in training datasets. AI companies implement transparent, opt-in consent mechanisms and develop compensation systems for creators whose work trains their models. Generative AI becomes one tool among many in creative communities' toolkits: useful for specific applications but not displacing human creativity or collaborative practice.

This optimistic scenario assumes substantial changes in how AI development currently operates: changes that powerful technology companies have strong financial incentives to resist. It also requires legal victories for artists in ongoing copyright cases, outcomes that remain far from certain given the complexities of applying existing law to novel technologies.

A grimmer possibility sees current trajectories continue unchecked. AI-generated content proliferates, further depressing already precarious creative economies. Community art programmes increasingly rely on algorithmic generation to save costs, eroding the collaborative and relationship-building functions of collective creativity. The economic incentives toward efficiency overwhelm cultural commitments to human creative labour, whilst legal frameworks fail to establish meaningful protections or compensation mechanisms.

A third possibility (neither wholly optimistic nor entirely pessimistic) envisions creative communities developing hybrid practices that thoughtfully integrate AI tools while preserving essential human elements. In this scenario, artists and communities establish their own principles for when and how to use generative AI. Some creative contexts explicitly exclude algorithmic generation, maintaining spaces for purely human creativity. Others incorporate AI tools strategically, using them to augment rather than replace human creative labour. Communities develop literacies around algorithmic systems, understanding both their capabilities and limitations.

This hybrid future requires cultural institutions, funding bodies, and communities themselves to actively shape how AI tools integrate into creative practice, rather than passively accepting whatever technology companies offer. It means developing ethical frameworks, establishing community standards, and being willing to reject conveniences that undermine fundamental creative values.

What seems certain is that generative AI will not simply disappear. The technologies exist, the models have been released, and the capabilities they offer are too powerful for some actors to ignore. The question facing creative communities isn't whether AI image generation will be part of the cultural landscape; it already is. The question is whether communities can assert enough agency to ensure these tools serve rather than supplant human creativity, collaboration, and cultural expression.

The Economic Restructuring of Creative Work

Underlying all these tensions is a fundamental economic restructuring of creative labour, one with particular consequences for community arts practice and local cultural production.

Before generative AI, the economics of visual art creation established certain boundaries and relationships. Creating images required time, skill, and effort. This created economic value that could sustain professional artists, whilst also creating spaces where collaborative creation made economic sense.

Commissioning custom artwork cost money, incentivising businesses and institutions to carefully consider what they truly needed and to value the results. The economic friction of creative production shaped not just industries but cultural practices and community relationships.

Generative AI collapses much of this economic structure. The marginal cost of producing an additional AI-generated image approaches zero: just the computational expense of a few seconds of processing time. This economic transformation ripples through creative communities in complex ways.

For commercial creative work, the effects have been swift and severe. Businesses that once hired illustrators for marketing materials, product visualisations, or editorial content increasingly generate images in-house using AI tools. The work still happens, but it shifts from paid creative labour to unpaid tasks added to existing employees' responsibilities. A marketing manager who once commissioned illustrations now spends an hour crafting prompts and selecting outputs. The images get made, but the economic value that previously flowed to artists vanishes.

This matters immensely for community creative capacity. Many professional artists have historically supplemented income from commercial work with community arts practice: teaching classes, facilitating workshops, leading public art projects. As commercial income shrinks, artists must choose between reducing community engagement to pursue other income sources or accepting reduced overall earnings. Either way, communities lose experienced creative practitioners who once formed the backbone of local arts infrastructure.

The economics also reshape what kinds of creative projects seem viable. When image creation is essentially free, the calculus around community art initiatives changes. A community organisation planning a fundraising campaign might once have allocated budget for commissioned artwork, hiring a local artist and building economic relationships within the community. Now they can generate imagery for free, keeping those funds for other purposes. Individually rational economic decisions accumulate into a systematic withdrawal of resources from community creative labour.

Yet the economic transformation isn't entirely one-directional. Some artists have repositioned themselves as creative directors rather than purely executors, offering vision, curation, and aesthetic judgement that AI tools cannot replicate. Whether this adaptation can sustain viable creative careers at scale, or merely benefits a fortunate few whilst the majority face displacement, remains an open question.

Reclaiming the Commons

At its core, the generative AI disruption of community creativity is a story about power, labour, and cultural commons. It's about who controls the tools and data shaping visual culture. It's about whether creative labour will be valued and compensated or strip-mined to train systems that then undercut the artists who provided that labour. It's about whether local communities can maintain distinctive cultural practices or whether algorithmic optimisation pushes everything toward a bland, homogenised aesthetic centre.

These aren't new questions. Every significant technological shift in creative production (from photography to digital editing software) has provoked similar anxieties about artistic authenticity, labour displacement, and cultural change. In each previous case, creative communities eventually adapted, finding ways to incorporate new tools whilst preserving what they valued in established practices.

Photography didn't destroy painting, though 19th-century painters feared it would. Digital tools didn't eliminate hand-drawn illustration, though they transformed how illustration was practiced and distributed. In each case, creative communities negotiated relationships with new technologies, establishing norms, developing new hybrid practices, and finding ways to preserve what they valued whilst engaging with new capabilities.

But generative AI represents a transformation of different character and scale. Previous creative technologies augmented human capabilities or changed how human creativity was captured and distributed. A camera didn't paint portraits; it captured reality through a lens that required human judgement about composition, lighting, timing, and subject. Photoshop didn't draw illustrations; it provided tools for human artists to manipulate digital imagery with greater flexibility and power.

Generative AI, by contrast, claims to replace significant aspects of human creative labour entirely, producing outputs that are often indistinguishable from human-made work, trained on that work without consent or compensation. The technology doesn't merely augment human creativity; it aspires to automate it, substituting algorithmic pattern-matching for human creative vision and labour.

This distinction matters because it shapes what adaptation looks like. Creative communities can't simply treat generative AI as another tool in the toolkit, because the technology's fundamental operation (replacing human creative labour with computational processing) cuts against core values of creative practice and community arts development. The challenge isn't just learning to use new tools; it's determining whether and how those tools can coexist with sustainable creative communities and valued cultural practices.

Some paths forward are emerging. Some artists and communities are establishing “AI-free” zones and practices, explicitly rejecting algorithmic generation in favour of purely human creativity. These spaces might be seen as resistance or preservation efforts, maintaining alternatives to algorithmically-dominated creative production. Whether they can sustain themselves economically whilst competing with free or cheap AI-generated alternatives remains uncertain.

Other communities are attempting to develop ethical frameworks for AI use: principles that govern when algorithmic generation is acceptable and when it isn't. These frameworks typically distinguish between using AI as a tool within human-directed creative processes versus allowing it to replace human creative labour entirely. Implementation challenges abound, particularly around enforcement and the slippery slope from limited to extensive AI reliance.

This isn't mere technological evolution. It's a fundamental challenge to creative labour's value and creative communities' autonomy. Whether artists, communities, and cultural institutions can meet that challenge (can reassert control over how algorithmic tools enter creative spaces and what values govern their use) will determine whether the future of community creativity is one of genuine flourishing or gradual hollowing out.

The stakes extend beyond creative communities themselves. Arts and culture function as crucial elements of civic life, building social connection, facilitating expression, processing collective experiences, and creating shared meaning. If generative AI undermines the sustainable practice of community creativity, the losses will extend far beyond artists' livelihoods, affecting the social fabric and cultural health of communities themselves.

The algorithmic genie is out of the bottle. The question is whether it will serve the commons or consume it. That answer depends not on technology alone but on choices communities, institutions, and societies make about what they value, what they're willing to fight for, and what kind of creative future they want to build.


Sources and References

Allen, Jason M. (2022). Multiple posts in Midjourney Discord server regarding Colorado State Fair win. Discord. August-September 2022. https://discord.com/channels/662267976984297473/993481462068301905/1012597813357592628

Andersen, Sarah, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz v. Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt. (2023). Class Action Complaint. United States District Court, Northern District of California. Case filed 13 January 2023. https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/

BBC News. (2023). “AI image creator faces UK and US legal challenges.” BBC Technology. 18 January 2023. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64285227

Butterick, Matthew. (2023). “Stable Diffusion litigation.” Announcement blog post. 16 January 2023. https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/

Colorado State Fair. (2022). “2022 Fine Arts Competition Results: Digital Arts / Digitally-Manipulated Photography.” https://coloradostatefair.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2022-Fine-Arts-First-Second-Third.pdf

Goold, Patrick. (2023). Quoted in BBC News. “AI image creator faces UK and US legal challenges.” 18 January 2023.

LAION (Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network). (2022). “LAION-5B: A new era of open large-scale multi-modal datasets.” Dataset documentation. https://laion.ai/

MoMA (Museum of Modern Art). (2025). “Sasha Stiles: A LIVING POEM.” Exhibition information. September 2025-Spring 2026. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5839

Mostaque, Emad. (2022). Quoted in multiple sources regarding Stable Diffusion training data size.

Palmer, RJ. (2022). Twitter post regarding AI art tools and artist livelihoods. August 2022.

Peters, Craig. (2023). Quoted in BBC News. “AI image creator faces UK and US legal challenges.” 18 January 2023.

Robak, Olga. (2022). Quoted in The Pueblo Chieftain and The New York Times regarding Colorado State Fair competition rules and judging.

Roose, Kevin. (2022). “An A.I.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize. Artists Aren't Happy.” The New York Times. 2 September 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html

Stability AI. (2022). “Stable Diffusion Public Release.” Company announcement. 22 August 2022. https://stability.ai/news/stable-diffusion-public-release

Vincent, James. (2022). “An AI-generated artwork's state fair victory fuels arguments over 'what art is'.” The Verge. 1 September 2022. https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/1/23332684/ai-generated-art-blob-opera-dall-e-midjourney

Vincent, James. (2023). “AI art tools Stable Diffusion and Midjourney targeted with copyright lawsuit.” The Verge. 16 January 2023. https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/16/23557098/generative-ai-art-copyright-legal-lawsuit-stable-diffusion-midjourney-deviantart

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Tim Green

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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