The AI Con: How To Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want

AI is just a marketing term. Through contemporary case studies, Bender (linguistics, Univ. of Washington) and Hanna (director of research, Distributed AI Research Institute) excellently elucidate the behind-the-scenes of generative artificial intelligence and why it has never been all it’s cracked up to be. They explore the harmful impact that the imposition of generative AI—as well as its major players like tech CEOs, high-profile engineers, and politicians—has had on cultural industries and the damage that occurs when powerful interests frame new applications of AI as inevitable, magical, and something to be adapted to without the possibility of simple rectification. Bender and Hanna bring their expertise in linguistics, sociology, and information science to their research, concretizing what they do every week in their popular livestream, Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, which invites experts in academia and the tech industry to deconstruct the hype around AI.