The AI Con

Emily M. Bender & Alex Hanna share about their book, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want on episode 576 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

What’s going on with the phrase artificial intelligence is not that it means something else than what we’re using it to mean, it’s that it doesn’t have a proper referent in the world.
-Emily M. Bender

There’s a much broader range of people who can have opinions on AI.
-Alex Hanna

The boosters say AI is a thing. It’s inevitable, it’s imminent, it’s going to be super powerful, and it’s going to solve all of our problems. And the doomers say AI is a thing, it’s inevitable, it’s imminent, it’s going to be super powerful, and it’s going to kill us all. And you can see that there’s actually not a lot of daylight between those two positions, despite the discourse of saying these are two opposite ends of a spectrum.
-Emily M. Bender

Teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions.
-Alex Hannay

• The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna
• Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR)
• The Princess Bride
• Emily Tucker, Executive Director, Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law
• On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? By Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell
• Emily M. Bender’s website
• How the right to education is undermined by AI, by Helen Beetham
• How We are Not Using AI in the Classroom, by Sonja Drimmer & Christopher J. Nygren 
• Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, by Karen Hao