In THE AI CON: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want, Dr. Emily M. Bender, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington, and Dr. Alex Hanna, Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, meticulously break down and reconstruct how we think about so-called artificial intelligence and, in doing so, upend the overblown claims of AI hype.
With expertise drawn from years of scholarship, Bender and Hanna offer keen perspective and pointed humor as they explain how these technologies actually work. They go on to investigate attempts to use these tools in government, law, healthcare, journalism, art and beyond — and the damage being done amid the broken promises of the technology. And they show how the outlandish claims about AI’s potential and dangers alike are manufactured and perpetuated by the very billionaires who stand to gain the most from a free market embrace of AI. Fortunately, Bender and Hanna also provide a guide that anyone can use to cut through all this AI hype in the workplace, at school, in our communities and at home.

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 expert who has been featured across the media, including articles in the Washington Post, Financial Times, The Atlantic, and Time.