Anti-AIPerson

Zeynep Tufekci

Sociologist and New York Times columnist

Princeton sociologist and New York Times columnist with a record of early calls on technology’s harms. She argues AI’s real threat is surveillance, manipulation, and eroded privacy — not science-fiction extinction — and that the hype is colliding with unreliability.

Academic Journalist Author

Wikipedia

In her words

We’re building this infrastructure of surveillance authoritarianism merely to get people to click on ads.

— TED, 2017

The idea that millions of people are going to be speaking to a machine that speaks like a human, talks with them, we don’t even have language or concepts to understand. This is one of the biggest historic deals ever in human history.

— Elon University (Baird Lecture), 2026

Biography

Zeynep Tufekci is a Turkish-American sociologist, born in Istanbul and trained first as a computer programmer, who is now the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and an opinion columnist at The New York Times. A 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary, she built a reputation for being right early — on social media’s role in protest movements (“Twitter and Tear Gas,” 2017), on algorithmic radicalization, and on the pandemic — that gives her technology warnings unusual weight.

The real threat is not the robot apocalypse

Tufekci’s through-line on AI predates ChatGPT: her 2017 TED talk warned that machine learning built for ad targeting was quietly assembling the infrastructure of authoritarian control. In her columns she has consistently argued that existential-risk talk, however exciting, distracts from AI’s actual and present dangers — mass surveillance, privacy erosion, algorithmic manipulation of what billions of people see and believe — harms she links to the early stages of authoritarianism.

She is equally hard on the industry’s promises. In a June 2026 Times column, “The Unstoppable Force of A.I. Hype Is Meeting One Immovable Fact,” she argued that industry-stoked fears of AI taking every job keep colliding with the technology’s unreliability, citing chatbot fiascos from Air Canada’s invented refund policy to McDonald’s abandoned drive-through bots. At Elon University’s Baird Lecture that spring she called conversational AI genuinely epochal while pressing for verification systems “compatible with democracy, privacy” — and told students the scale of the problem was no excuse for fatalism: “Don’t let anybody tell you this is so big that we can’t do anything.”

Tufekci files as anti not for opposing AI’s existence but for a decade of sustained public warnings: that the companies deploying it are unaccountable, that its surveillance substrate is corrosive to democracy, and that both the doom narrative and the jobs-apocalypse narrative serve the industry’s interests more than the public’s.