The AI Con

A smart, incisive take-down of 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. 'You need to read this book' BRIAN ENO 'Written with absolute authority and incredible wit and verve' KAREN HAO Have tech companies created artificial minds? Are they going to replace all our jobs? Will they take over the world? The answers to these questions, as the expert authors of The AI Con make clear, are 'no', 'they wish' and 'LOL, definitely not'. In fact, these fears are all symptoms of the hype being used to justify data theft, motivate surveillance capitalism and devalue human creativity in order to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines. Packed with real-world examples of the injustices and harms already being done in the name of 'AI', The AI Con arms you to spot the hype in all its guises, expose the exploitation it aims to hide and push back against it at work and in your daily life. 'A must-read...provide[s] the clearest picture yet of what AI is, what it is not, and why none of us need to accept it being shoved down our throats' TIMNIT GEBRU 'A powerful antidote to the hype' GRACE BLAKELEY 'Truly eye-opening...indispensable' HA-JOON CHANG 'A book to inoculate your mind' YANIS VAROUFAKIS 'Refreshing...persuasive' GUARDIAN

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.