AI hype and the illusion of intelligence

In this episode, Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera and Alex Rivera Cartagena discuss the looming social, cultural, and knowledge catastrophe described in The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want (Harper, 2025). They explore how narratives around artificial intelligence are shaped by powerful tech companies, often obscuring the real limitations, risks, and social costs of these systems.

Their conversation challenges many common assumptions about AI’s inevitability and neutrality, examining how the hype surrounding it threatens university life, just labor practices, and resource allocation. They also bring to light practical ways that individuals, communities, and institutions can resist misleading claims and advocate for more accountable technologies. They argue on behalf of a critical roadmap for rethinking our relationship with AI—one grounded not in hype and speculation, but in democratic values and collective action.

This is the first of two episodes about The AI Con. The second, in Spanish, will appear on the New Books Network en español.

This conversation is sponsored in part by the Teagle Foundation and the “STEM to STEAM” program, which stresses the importance of reading and integrating humanistic perspectives in the sciences.

Quotes, organizations, books, scholars, and articles mentioned in this conversation:

• Instituto Nuevos Horizontes
• Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez
• Elogio a las cercanías: crítica a la cultura tecnológica actual, Héctor José Huyke.
• The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking, Shannon Vallor.
• The Costs of Connection and "Rethinking Big Data's Relation to the Contemporary Subject," by Nick Couldry and Ulises Ali Mejias.
• DukeGPT
• Wendy Brown
• Ivan Illich
• "Has such promise but is so empty." -Alex Rivera Cartagena
• "We know that they don't understand." -Emily M. Bender
  
• "The real privilege is not using this technology; it is avoiding it." -Alex Rivera Cartagena
• "AI flattens relationships into the words we exchange instead of the things we do." -Emily M. Bender
• "It's not about the text specifically but the idea the text enables." -Alex Hanna
• "It doesn't make us think about process." -Alex Hanna
• "The groups that are already formed can be very powerful pathways for political education and for ensuring there's an integration of society and tech that works for people." -Alex Hanna
• "The very idea of intelligence is that you can rank people based on one property...that same racist eugenicist concept." -Emily M. Bender
• "The imposition of technology is presented as philanthropy." -Emily M. Bender
• "Metaphor of data colonialism" -Alex Hanna
• "How do we get there without a natural disaster?" -Emily M. Bender

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