Abstract: Natural language processing (NLP) is in the middle of a moment of wide public attention due to applications of large language models such as ChatGPT. This attention is highlighting some of the many challenges that NLP has faced including bias, ethical data management and collection, and wider social impacts of our technologies. While these challenges are not new, the scale with which NLP technologies are being developed and propagated without the express consent of individuals–or other legal basis–for data processing while also being introduced to a variety of domains such as education, law, programming, and other professional spheres with little regard to the impacts of the technologies forces the question of whether contemporary NLP research is for the people, or the people are for NLP research. In this talk, I will argue that to ensure NLP research remains in service of people, we must take seriously our responsibility as designers and creators of technology by confronting risks and dangers–such as to low resource speakers and empty promises of social good–and provide directions for how to research on NLP can act in the service of individual agency and fundamental rights.