Emily M. Bender & Alex Hanna w/ Anna Lauren Hoffmann, THE AI CON

is a smart, incisive look at the technologies sold as artificial intelligence, the drawbacks and pitfalls of technology sold under this banner, and why it’s crucial to recognize the many ways in which AI hype covers for a small set of power-hungry actors at work and in the world.

About the Book

Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of business? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything?

The answer to these questions, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna make clear, is “no,” “they wish,” “LOL,” and “definitely not.” This kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype.” Hype looks and smells fishy: It twists words and helps the rich get richer by justifying data theft, motivating surveillance capitalism, and devaluing human creativity in order to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines. In The AI Con, Bender and Hanna offer a sharp, witty, and wide-ranging take-down of AI hype across its many forms.

Bender and Hanna show you how to spot AI hype, how to deconstruct it, and how to expose the power grabs it aims to hide. Armed with these tools, you will be prepared to push back against AI hype at work, as a consumer in the marketplace, as a skeptical newsreader, and as a citizen holding policymakers to account. Together, Bender and Hanna expose AI hype for what it is: a mask for Big Tech’s drive for profit, with little concern for who it affects.

About the Authors

Dr. Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Linguistics and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Computer Science and the Information School at the University of Washington, where she has been on the faculty since 2003. She is the co-author of recent influential papers such as Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data and On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? and the book The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want, with sociologist Dr. Alex Hanna.

In her public scholarship, Bender brings linguistic insights to lay audiences to cut through the hype about "AI" and facilitate understanding of the actual functionality of the systems being sold under that name. In 2022 she was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and in September 2023 she was included in the first-ever TIME100AI list highlighting 100 individuals advancing major conversations about how AI is reshaping the world.

Dr. Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) and a Lecturer in the School of Information at the University of California Berkeley. She is an outspoken critic of the tech industry, a proponent of community-based uses of technology, and a highly sought-after speaker and expert who has been featured across the media, including articles in the Washington Post, Financial Times, The Atlantic, and Time.

About the Interlocutor

Dr. Anna Lauren Hoffmann is an Associate Professor with the Information School at the University of Washington. A leading figure in the critical and ethical study of technology, Dr. Hoffmann’s work combines philosophy, critical theory, feminism, and queer theory with her training in information studies to interrogate how ethics, values, and norms are (or are not) articulated relative to data and information technologies today.

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Host or Publisher Elliott Bay Book Company