Best Of Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna's "The AI Con"

Here is a selection of memorable quotes from The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna.

On the history of eugenics in Silicon Valley and its connections to AI

While many think of eugenics as a terrible part of history, Silicon Valley has deep and enduring connections to eugenicist thought. Stanford University's first president, David Jordan Starr, was a strident eugenicist who recruited eugenicist thinkers to major professorships within the university, among them Lewis Terman. Terman, the codifier of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, adapted Binet's original cognitive test in order to promote racial hierarchies that put white people at the top. Today, the kingmakers in the Valley have sometimes exuberantly, sometimes quietly, endorsed and financially supported eugenicist thinkers and alt-right politicians. These are the same few who have the power to make or break newcomers in the crowded artificial intelligence market.

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On the future of ethical journalism without AI

Alternative organizational models may be a way forward for journalism. One strategy has been to get the profit motive out of the newsroom altogether, which can help stave off the market pressures to churn out constant content with Al to tulfill SEO goals and turn a profit for private equity owners. The nonprofit ProPublica has partnered with newspapers in dozens of cities with their Local Reporting Network initiative and is committed to placing reporters in every state in the U.S. This initiative has already borne fruit with excellent reporting recognized with one Pulitzer and several finalists. In another testament to the power of nonprofit journalism, ProPublica itself was awarded with journalism's highest honor for public service in 2024 for reporting on the influence of billionaire gift-giving on U.S. Supreme Court justices.

Other nonprofits, like the Invisible Institute, have also emerged and been rightfully recognized for their excellent reporting on racial in-equality, gender-based violence, and police misconduct. Nonprofits are not a magic bullet, however, since they are often beholden to the whims of philanthropists and have their on problems, especially when they begin to cover issues that might upset their donors. Most of these institutions have statements of editorial in-dependence, but that does not prevent a donor from pulling the plug if they happen to start snooping too closely.

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What happens after the AI bubble pops?

But we’re more pessimistic-and frankly upset-about what will be left behind once the Al bubble pops. Already, Google and Microsoft have sheepishly admitted that they are far from reaching their climate goals, due to the large investment in AI. Data center growth is putting immense stress on existing power grids, not to mention are turning literal Black and Indigenous bodies into grist for the mill: data center and electric infrastructure construction in Northern Virginia is threatening to build atop a historical cemetery of free Black people, formerly enslaved Black people, and Indigenous Americans for this insatiable machine. After the dust settles and Nvidia has stopped churning out shovels (e.g., the hardware called H100s) for the gold rush, what will be left behind? Will data centers go the way of shopping malls? Likely not-they'll be repurposed for other massive computing projects. But what about those climate pledges? Will they be continued to be kicked down the road? To 2050? To 2075? If we leave the tech companies to their own devices, they'll likely settle for too little, too late.

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Generative Al has the potential to ruin what were stable careers—not because the technology can do the work effectively or as skillfully, but it can produce convincing enough synthetic media to make certain jobs seem to managers redundant or requiring less skill than before.

After the AI bubble bursts, where do these careers go? Managers and execs aren't likely to hire back career workers to do the skilled labor they once dia. They'll hire more contingent laborers, doing more with less. The residue of the bubble will be sticky, coating creative industries with a thick, sooty grime of limitless tech ex-pansionism. This is the fallout of venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs not pausing to think about who would be caught in the blast radius.

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Bonus video from my Storytime with Emi project where I read a quote from The AI Con:

They also offer some great questions to ponder when encountering AI hype:

“Beyond that, these questions can help you push back on hype, if you are in a position to ask them aloud.

What is being automated? What goes in, and what comes out?

Can you connect the inputs to outputs?

Are these systems being described as human?

Who benefits from this technology, who is harmed, and what recourse do they have?

How was the system developed? What are their labor and data practices? 

Finally, we can and should always ask: How was the system developed, and what kinds of data labor and data collection practices were used?”

- from The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want”

by Drs. Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna