The AI Con

How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want

De: Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna

Narrado por: Jade Wheeler

A smart, incisive look at the technologies sold as artificial intelligence, the drawbacks and pitfalls of technology sold under this banner, and why it’s crucial to recognize the many ways in which AI hype covers for a small set of power-hungry actors at work and in the world.

Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of business? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything?

The answer to these questions, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna make clear, is “no,” “they wish,” “LOL,” and “definitely not.” This kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype.” Hype looks and smells fishy: It twists words and helps the rich get richer by justifying data theft, motivating surveillance capitalism, and devaluing human creativity in order to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines. In The AI Con, Bender and Hanna offer a sharp, witty, and wide-ranging take-down of AI hype across its many forms.

Bender and Hanna show you how to spot AI hype, how to deconstruct it, and how to expose the power grabs it aims to hide. Armed with these tools, you will be prepared to push back against AI hype at work, as a consumer in the marketplace, as a skeptical newsreader, and as a citizen holding policymakers to account. Together, Bender and Hanna expose AI hype for what it is: a mask for Big Tech’s drive for profit, with little concern for who it affects.

©2025 Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna (P)2025 HarperCollins Publishers

Solid Hype Balance

The readers tone was a little preachy but the thoughts, insights and evidence were good. Impactful and a valuable dose of downside realism. It impacted my thinking.

A must read, even if you're an AI optimist

Great voice, factual and entertaining. One of the best audio books I've read in a while.

Important Read

This is an important read, an antidote to a collective delusion about the latest tech, with worrying real-world consequences.

I hope everyone checks this out

A must read

Everyone should listen to this book it’s enlightenment . Spot on analysis. Very timely and impotent

Whining about technology

The book provided some interesting points about the history of AI and the technologies that underlie its foundations. I share the authors views about “synthetic media machines” and “stochastic word extruders” but the book did not do a good job explaining why those sorts of systems can’t be useful. It’s true these technologies are often oversold, that doesn’t make them less useful in what they are good at. The book put too much emphasis on the racist history of the tech, without allowing for the broader historical framework and cultural progress. Just because a scientist said a few racist things does not make his tech racist. I don’t see how you can put the genie back into the bottle and this book did not adequately address the very real problem with how the broader culture is responding to these new technology items.