✍️ By Ismael Kherroubi Garcia.
Ismael is Founder & Co-lead of the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Network (RAIN), and Founder & CEO of Kairoi.
📌 Editor’s Note: This article is part of our Tech Futures series, a collaboration between the Montreal AI Ethics Institute (MAIEI) and the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Network (RAIN). In this special instalment of Tech Futures by RAIN, we consider two ways in which the Big Tech industry draws on the playbook of the fossil fuels industry.
Oil was the driving force of economic growth in the 20th century. Now, it’s AI. That’s the story motivating many large-scale investments into AI innovation, research and infrastructure, from the US to the Persian Gulf to Asia and beyond. AI is seen as a vehicle for economic growth. But is this the only sense in which AI and oil are similar, or is there more beneath the surface? What else does the analogy point to? In this two-part series, we present four ways in which Big Tech reflects the practices of the fossil fuels industry: by shaping research, owning fiction, mining resources, and infiltrating policy.
Shaping Research
For decades, the fossil fuels industry has produced research that undermines the link between fossil fuels and climate change. The role of carbon emissions in rising global temperatures was hypothesized in 1896 by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, whose work was crucial for climate science to take off in the 1950s. By then, industry firms were leading in fossil fuels research through the Smoke and Fumes Committee, established in the 1940s and operating within the American Petroleum Institute (API) for the following two decades. Among their members were Esso (now ExxonMobil), Shell, and companies now part of Chevron. This makes sense; understanding your own product is good business. But their research was not open or impactful in the way scientific research is. The industry learned of the environmental effects of carbon emissions, but kept that information to themselves to the detriment of climate scientists, policy makers, and the wellbeing of our planet.
Big Tech has been doing something similar. Leading AI firms have funded researchers at universities for some time, thereby shaping research questions and even how findings are framed. Things become clearer within Big Tech firms like Google, where a “sensitive topics” review process was developed in 2020. On the back of the process, internal correspondence from a senior Google manager stated the need to “take great care to strike a positive tone” in publications, and Dr. Timnit Gebru was fired for defending her work On the dangers of stochastic parrots.
Similar to the Smoke and Fumes Committee, Big Tech has also collaborated in shaping AI research. In 2016, Partnership on AI (PAI) was established by Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, and Amazon, among others, including academic and non-profit organizations. PAI’s stated goal was “to study and formulate best practices on AI technologies, [and study] AI and its influences on people and society.” However, a number of the academic and non-profit members eventually concluded that their role was to legitimize the effort, rather than be heard. Ultimately, Big Tech-funded science steers academia towards the promotion of their own, profit-driven interests; not the knowledge-production activities that society needs and science delivers.
Owning Fiction
In 1915, Ford Motor Company started its own film production unit. Shell, BP, Total and other fossil fuel companies would follow Ford’s lead throughout the century, establishing a deep but complex relationship with Hollywood. The goal was to produce films depicting oil prospecting as “a high-stakes game with massive rewards, whether for the nation, the stockholder, the potential employee, or just the average citizen who would benefit from a full tank, a warm bath, and a healthy economy.” By working with some of the best filmmakers and actors, the stories went on to win major awards.
The fossil fuels industry also produced films demonstrating their corporate responsibility. Shell and BP even became big players in the environmentalist cinematic movement of the 1960s and 1970s, with films such as Clean Water and The Shadow of Progress. Fast-forward to today, and we see these efforts as exemplars of “green washing,” providing misleading information to present oneself as environmentally friendly. Although they continue—most clearly, in advertising—we now see through the charming façades, as denounced by the Union of Concerned Scientists and so many others.
If Google wants to “strike a positive tone” in their scientific work, what must they think about AI being depicted as killer robots in so much fiction? Through 100 Zeros—a partnership with Range Media Partners—and with XPrize, Google has launched a $3.5M competition to promote “optimistic science fiction storytelling.” The 100 Zeros project was first spotted in 2024 and resulted in its first short in 2025, Sweetwater, which appears to present “a softer image of AI.”
Google is not alone in its purchase of silver-screen time. In 2022, Amazon purchased Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which is behind many Hollywood classics. In February 2026, Amazon MGM announced plans to adopt AI for cost-cutting purposes. Meanwhile, Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs also funded Pixar in 1986; the movie Wall-E was seen to make nods to Apple products in 2008, and the Apple TV streaming service as we know it was launched in 2019.
Big Tech is trying to take over how we think about AI.
Image credit: Hanna Barakat & Archival Images of AI + AIxDESIGN / Better Images of AI / CC BY 4.0