Human stand‑ins and the myth of full automation

Prof. Emily M. Bender, linguist, and Dr. Alex Hanna, sociologist join us to discuss their 2025 book The AI Con and how Big Tech spun marketing around "stochastic parrots". Find lots more from Emily and Alex on their podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 from the Distributed AI Research Institute!

Books Mentioned

• Emily Bender & Alex Hanna, The AI Con

• Rua M. Williams, Disabling Intelligences: Legacies of Eugenics and How We are Wrong about AI

Further Reading

• Bender, et. al, "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?", https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922