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

The author argues that large-scale corporate artificial intelligence, or “Big AI,” is accelerating a converging set of ecological, cultural, and linguistic crises that together constitute a global metacrisis. Focusing on large language models, the article examines how these technologies intensify environmental pressures, undermine meaning-making and democratic processes, and contribute to the marginalization and loss of linguistic diversity. Drawing on interdisciplinary research across computational linguistics, ecology, and social theory, the author challenges the prevailing narrative of scalability and technological neutrality, and advances a set of proposals aimed at reorienting natural language processing toward the public good, human flourishing, and life on a living planet.