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

As AI technologies proliferate, so do the absurd and false claims about their potential. AI boosters would have you believe that AI is solving intractable problems, automating decision-making, outsmarting experts, revolutionizing newsrooms, and generally making our lives way easier and way better — or it will if it doesn’t morph into our dreaded machine overlord and extinguish humanity altogether. But maybe you’ve noticed that AI tools aren’t actually doing any of this. In fact, they can’t. They are, however, creating and exacerbating very real problems, and all the hype is drowning out the grim reality.

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

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