KPFA Against the Grain: Hyping AI (June 24, 2025)
Democracy at Work: “The AI Con” breaks down how AI is a parlor trick forced on us by greedy capitalists (June 23, 2025)
Next Big Idea Club: 5 AI Books to Read in 2025 (June 11, 2025)
Fast Company: 5 dark facts to remember in the face of AI hype (June 6, 2025)
The Atlantic: What Happens When People Don’t Understand How AI Works (June 6, 2025)
Inside Story: What are we talking about when we talk about AI? (June 5, 2025)
This Machine Kills podcast (June 4, 2025)
WFMU’s Techtonic with Mark Hurst (June 2, 2025)
Tech Policy Press podcast: Taking on the AI Con (June 1, 2025)
Book excerpt: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Government officials are letting AI do their jobs. Badly. (May 30, 2025)
In These Times: What’s Really Artificial About AI is AI Itself (May 29, 2025)
Voices of VR: Deconstructing AI Hype with “The AI Con” Authors Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna (May 23, 2025)
Tech Won’t Save Us: Generative AI is Not Inevitable (May 22, 2025)
Next Big Idea Club: Beyond the Hype: The Sinister Underbelly of AI Promises (May 20, 2025)
Design of AI podcast (May 20, 2025)
AI and You podcast (Part 1: May 19, 2025; Part 2: May 26, 2025)
New Day Northwest (May 19, 2025)
Fiction Science podcast (May 19, 2025)
GeekWire and CosmicLog: Scholars explain how humans can hold the line against AI hype, and why it’s necessary (May 19, 2025)
The Guardian (May 19, 2025)
Tomayto Tomahto (May 19, 2025)
AI and You (May 19, 2025)
ESC KEY .CO: Do you believe in hope after “AI” hype? Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna make the case (May 18, 2025)
TechNation (May 14, 2025)
CBC News: Will AI make us better writers? Or kill our critical thinking? (May 14, 2025)
Marketplace Tech: AI technologies are more riddled with marketing hype than actual capabilities, new book suggests (May 14, 2025)
Big Technology Podcast: AI’s Drawbacks: Environmental Damage, Bad Benchmarks, Outsourcing Thinking (May 14, 2025)
A Fresh Face in Hell (May 14, 2025)
This Week in Tech (May 14, 2025)
CNET: How to Spot AI Hype and Avoid The AI Con, According to Two Experts (May 13, 2025)
AI-tocracy (May 13, 2025)
Harper Academic Calling podcast (May 13, 2025)
Keen On (May 12, 2025)
Business Insider: An ex-Google AI ethicist and a UW professor want you to know AI isn’t what you think it is (May 12, 2025)
Because Language podcast (May 12, 2025)
DSR’s Siliconsciousness podcast (May 9, 2025)
SF Examiner: AI researchers hope to pierce technology’s hype with new book, Troy Wolverton (May 6, 2025)
KUOW: The fantasy (and reality) of AI (May 5, 2025)
The Vocal Fries podcast (May 5, 2025)
AI Inside podcast: Busting Big-Tech Hype, TESCREAL Terrors & Real-World Harms (May 3, 2025)
Kirkus Reviews: 5 Essential New Books That Challenge Big Tech (May 1, 2025)
LibraryReads Notable Nonfiction for May 2025 (Audio soundbite)
Disconnect: A critical tech reading list for spring 2025 (April 9, 2025)
The Next Big Idea Club’s May 2025 Must-Read Books (March 7, 2025)
Notable
You Are Not a Parrot
And a chatbot is not a human. And a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this.
A profile of Emily in New York Magazine. (March 2023)
Alex makes Business Insider AI Power List
“A near-term AI dystopia is one in which there’s not a masterful AI that takes over the world — that’s bullshit — it’s a world in which there are AI tools which are promised to do XYZ and that many employers have effectively bought into only to lay off full-time workers and hire them back at a reduced rate,” Hanna told Business Insider. (October 2024)
Emily named to Inaugural Time100 AI
“You can’t expect a machine-learning system to learn stuff that’s not in its training data,” [Emily] says. “Otherwise you’re expecting magic.” (September 2023)
Op-ed: “AI” Hurts Consumers and Workers — and Isn’t Intelligent
“The next steps are to use identified harms—to workers, to the information ecosystem and to data privacy—to plug gaps in existing laws and regulations. Meanwhile, we call on businesses not to succumb to this artificial “intelligence” hype.” Alex and Emily write for Tech Policy Press. (August 2023)
Op-ed: AI Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-Humanity Hype
“We urge policymakers to draw on solid scholarship that investigates the harms and risks of AI, as well as the harms caused by delegating authority to automated systems, which include the disempowerment of the poor and the intensification of policing against Black and Indigenous families. Solid research in this domain—including social science and theory building—and solid policy based on that research will keep the focus on not using this technology to hurt people.” Emily and Alex write for Scientific American. (August 2023)