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The AI Con

How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want
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Brief Description
Two of the world's best-known AI insiders-turned-critics expose the lies and hype surrounding AI. A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called 'artificial intelligence', exposing the real harm these technologies do to our jobs, health, society and environment, who stands to gain... Read More
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The AI Con

Packed with real-world examples, pithy arguments and expert insights, The AI Con arms you to spot AI hype in all its guises, expose the exploitation and power-grabs it aims to hide, and push back against it at work and in your daily life.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Two of the world's best-known AI insiders-turned-critics expose the lies and hype surrounding AI.

A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called 'artificial intelligence', exposing the real harm these technologies do to our jobs, health, society and environment, who stands to gain from them, and how to fight back.

Is AI going to take over the world? Have scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to replace all our jobs, even creative ones, like doctors, teachers and care-workers? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything?

The answers to these questions, as the expert authors of The AI Con make clear, are 'no', 'they wish', 'LOL', and 'definitely not'. In fact, these fears are all symptoms of the hype being used by tech corporations to justify data theft, motivate surveillance capitalism, and devalue human creativity so they can replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines.

Meanwhile, across healthcare, education, media, government and law-enforcement, 'AI' products are already being introduced that are unreliable, ineffective, unjust and dangerous.

Packed with real-world examples, pithy arguments and expert insights, The AI Con arms you to spot AI hype in all its guises, expose the exploitation and power-grabs it aims to hide, and push back against it at work and in your daily life.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781847928627

Publisher: Vintage Publishing

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 22 May 2025

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: The Bodley Head Ltd

Audience: General / adult, Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 22.0mm

Width: 153.0mm

Height: 232.0mm

Weight: 350g

Pages: 288

About the Author

Emily M. Bender (Author) Dr Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington. Her work, including the touchstone 'Stochastic Parrots' paper, brings a linguistic perspective to how large language models work and why the illusion they produce is so compelling. In 2023 she was included in the inaugural TIME100 AI list of most influential people in AI. Alex Hanna (Author) Dr Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) and a former senior research scientist on Google's Ethical AI team. She is an outspoken critic of the tech industry and a proponent of community-based uses of technology.

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