Is Al a con? A new book punctures the hype and proposes some ways to resist

Is Al going to take over the world? [it scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to replace all our jobs, even creative ones, like doctors, teachers and care workers? Are we about to enter an age where comput-ers are better than humans at every-thing?

- LUKE MuNN

The answers, as the authors of The AI Con stress, are “no”, “they wish”, “LOL” and “definitely not”.

Artificial intelligence is a market-ing term as much as a distinct set of computational architectures and techniques. AI has become a magic word for entrepreneurs to attract startup capital for dubious schemes, an incantation deployed by managers to instantly achieve the status of future-forward leaders.

In a mere two letters, it conjures a vision of automated factories and robotic overlords, a utopia of leisure or a dystopia of servitude, depending on your point of view. It is not just technology, but a powerful vision of how society should function and what our future should look like.

In this sense, AI doesn’t need to work for it to work. The accuracy of a large language model may be doubt-ful, the productivity of an Al office assistant may be claimed rather than demonstrated, but this bundle of technologies, companies and claims can still alter the terrain of journal-ism, education, healthcare, service work and our broader sociocultural landscape.

Pop goes the bubble

For Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, the AI hype bubble needs to be popped.

Bender is a linguistics professor at the University of Washington, who has become a prominent technology critic. Hanna is a sociologist and for-mer employee of Google, who is now the director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. After teaming up to mock AI boosters in their popular podcast, Mystery Al Hype Theater 3000, they have distilled their insights into a book written for a general audience. They meet the unstoppable force of AI hype with immovable scepticism.

Step one in this programme is grasping how AI models work.

Bender and Hanna do an excellent job of decoding technical terms and unpacking the “black box” of machine learning for lay people.