Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of business? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything?

The answer to these questions, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna make clear, are “no,” “they wish,” “LOL,” and “definitely not.” This kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype”. Hype looks and smells fishy. It twists words and helps the rich get richer by justifying data theft, motivating surveillance capitalism, and devaluing human creativity in order to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines. In their book The AI Con (Harper Collins, 2025, Emily Bender and Alex Hanna offer a sharp, witty, and wide-ranging take-down of AI hype across its many forms.

Emily Bender is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington. Her research interests encompass multilingual grammar engineering, computation in linguistics, societal impact of language technology and sociolinguistic variation.

Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). Her work examines how new computational technologies, such as AI and machine learning, exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality through their data practices and effects on labor.

Audrey Borowski is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Isaac Newton Trust Fellow at the University of Cambridge working on the philosophy of artificial intelligence. She received her doctorate from the University of Oxford and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and Aeon. Her first monograph, Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant has been published by Princeton University Press.

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THE PHILOSOPHER

Published since 1923