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The AI Con
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  • Published: 22 May 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529957327
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $55.00

The AI Con

How To Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want

Formats & editions
Paperback
27 Oct 2026
Tr. Paperback
20 May 2025
EBook
22 May 2025
Audiobook
22 May 2025
Hardback
22 June 2025
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Two of the world's best-known AI insiders-turned-critics expose the lies and hype surrounding AI

Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything?

The answer to these questions is 'no', 'they wish', 'LOL', and 'definitely not'.

In The AI Con, the renowned AI insiders-turned-critics Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, offer a sharp, witty, and wide-ranging take-down of AI hype across all its forms, exposing it for what it really is: a mask for data theft, surveillance capitalism, and the devaluing of human creativity in order to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines.

While most existing books celebrate the emergence of such powerful systems, The AI Con does something more important: it reveals that under cover of its dangerous misnomer, 'artificial intelligence' is simply the tech companies' latest ploy to become the robber barons of the 21st century.
  • Published: 22 May 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529957327
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $55.00
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About the authors

Emily M. Bender

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.
EM.

Alex Hanna

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.
AH