The AI Con w/ Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna

The AI Con may as well be the answer to the question: what happens when a linguist and a sociologist come together to write a book? Co-written by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, The AI Con isn’t just a book, it’s an instruction manual to guide readers through this era of AI hype. In short, this book does what academic scholarship does best: close read texts, historical patterns, marketing schemes, statistics, politics, and more—and find a way to connect these granular details and examples to broader trends in our society. The AI Con sits along this continuum between close reading and abstraction. It’s a book about “AI” technology, yes, but it’s also about the demands of an economy that values human labor and intelligence less and less. It’s a book about the ideals of democracy conflicting with economic pressures; the mutually determining relationship between worldviews and technology, or technology and institutional priorities; the power of technology if people have autonomy over it; and the problems with western epistemological orientations when they are imposed via technology onto populations and individuals who never consented for this technology to be imposed on them. This book is about a lot. But it’s also funny, and witty, and accessible, and written with the best intentions. Throughout this episode, Emily and Alex discuss their writing process, the pernicious economic undercurrents that paved the way for this AI hype era, contrasting epistemological orientations, how technology perpetuates societal biases, and much more. The AI Con Alex Hanna Emily M. Bender Sébastien Bubeck, et al, Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality The Less People Know About AI, the More They Like It Ars technica: “Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says” Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass Tomayto Tomahto is produced, written, and edited by Talia Sherman. Artwork by Maja Mishevska.