GUEST BLOG: Talk Liberation – It’s Begun: “Hire Humans” Graffitied On Burger King AI Drive-Thru

A New Zealand woman has been arrested after spray-painting a fast food outlet that replaced line staff with an AI ordering program

Humans are becoming increasingly upset by the various ways they perceive we are all negatively impacted by seemingly reckless and/or unjust governmental and commercial AI deployments. A lack of regulation or cohesive management of AI impacts is fuelling an inevitable fallout. “AI discontent” is going mainstream, and principled opposition to the emergent technology is predictably spiralling into real world protest actions being taken by everyday people, in an effort to educate the public and to force a reckoning in order to curb AI excesses and harm. There are many signs that the “AI discontent” is already having an effect.

The escalating pushback against AI adoption has gone global, with a 30-year-old New Zealand woman being arrested for spray-painting “Hire Humans” onto a Burger King drive-thru in Dunedin, in the South Island of New Zealand. As reported by Stuff, a major New Zealand online news outlet, “A person wearing a white mask reportedly entered the drive-thru area on foot, and spray-painted ‘Hire humans’ in white spraypaint on the drive-thru speaker… She told police that she did the graffiti because she was annoyed with companies, like Burger King, using AI technology instead of employing humans.”

Stuff then included a video at the bottom of its coverage – not of the act of protest, but of one of its reporters testing the efficacy of the Burger King AI ordering system to check whether it was able to cope with her chopping and changing various parts of its order. It was. “No mistakes… it seems like quite a straight forward process. Nice” nods its reporter at the end of the clip.

Nothing could better exemplify frustration with how AI is presented to the public -where an act of profound disgruntlement is smoothed over with what is effectively unpaid or undeclared advertising both of Burger King and its AI service within the same page.

Unmentioned by Stuff’s reporter is what is really going on under the hood as she speaks to the AI. Something as simple as ordering a burger is now an opportunity for corporations to gather key identifying information about consumers. From recording our voiceprints, to collecting and storing metadata such as when you order a burger; what you order; with what frequency; where and in what volumes, coupled with your payment information – methods of payment, type of payment, size of payment – these are all data points that can be used not only to profile your customer-ship but are also pushed upstream to AI providers to be shared with countless ‘marketing partners’ around the world and even with governments, police and security agencies.

That the Stuff reporter seems blissfully ignorant of this as she chirps her order to the AI and declares it “straight forward”, is a huge part of the problem.

But it’s not only the customers being stripped of their privacy – there is broader societal damage to the work and labour force, as AI systems begin to replace line staff, depriving low and middle income sectors of job opportunities that were traditionally available. In a prior article about Burger King’s AI ordering system rollout in New Zealand in mid-2025, the (now-closed) comments section showed citizens expressing similar concerns:

For students in particular but also other sectors of society, employment at a fast food restaurant was a normal rite of passage, with work and management training programmes often leading to an important transition into other employment sectors.

A rung on the career ladder is now missing in action for countless real people, impacting families and their communities. As the AI rollouts scale and more citizens are impacted, the reactions and objections are likely to become even more vehement.

Wikipedia frames AI discontent as being “controversies”, recounting a series of events from an early Microsoft Twitter chatbot disaster in 2016 that ended up having to be discontinued, to the recent scandal of sexualised deepfake images being widely created and circulated by GrokAI.

Wikipedia states: “While advocates emphasize the technology’s potential to solve complex problems and enhance human quality of life, detractors highlight a wide array of dangers and challenges. These include concerns over ethics, plagiarism and theft, fraud, safety and alignment, environmental impacts, technological unemployment, and the spread of misinformation. It also covers severe future or theoretical challenges, such as the emergence of artificial superintelligence and existential risks.”

Interestingly, some mainstream media have done a little bit better than just chalking it all up to controversies. In a surprisingly nuanced piece last October Newsweek titled “The AI Backlash Is Here: Why Public Patience With Tech Giants Is Running Out” Newsweek say that Generative AI has been “wildly oversold” and raise the now obvious spectre that AI is a giant investment bubble waiting to burst.

Business Insider published a piece by a reporter who actually attended an anti-AI protest, specifically a QuitGPT protest at the beginning of this month, held outside OpenAI’s headquarters. Many protesters views are directly quoted and in a refreshingly frank and genuine way.

In “The Public Opposition To AI Infrastructure Is Heating Up” TechCrunch covered in detail and at length, the issue of the environmental impacts of AI data centres and both legal and legislative efforts to rein them in, stating: “Environmental activists have long taken aim at data centers, but the more recent concerns have come from high-level lawmakers, drawing on populist anger at the tech industry broadly.”

The absence of open hostility, arrogance or mocking tones on display by the mainstream media towards members of the public who have serious concerns about AI suggests that the worry is more widespread than can be contained and/or that the media themselves share the concerns. For their own workplaces are being subjected to the same types of experimentation and job losses as the fast food industry.

Analysis of media industry layoffs in 2025 was already nothing short of devastating and 2026 is unlikely to be any better. At this rate, it may not be long before we see journalists themselves getting arrested for spray-painting “Hire Humans” on the doors of their own media outlets.

And many will cheer them on.

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