Pod: Emily Bender & Alex Hanna

Today, our guests are Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, co-authors of the book The AI Con, which came out earlier this year. 

Emily is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington where she is also the Faculty Director of the Computational Linguistics Master of Science program in the School of Computer Science and Engineering and the Information School. In 2023, she was included in the inaugural Time 100 list of the most influential people in AI. 

Alex is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and a Lecturer in the School of Information at the University of California Berkeley. She is an outspoken critic of the tech industry, a proponent of community-based uses of technology, and a highly sought-after speaker and expert. 

In the interview, we discuss how AI hoodwinks people by exploiting their natural tendency to assign intelligence to things that produce language, how “science is squarely in the hype danger zone,” the labor and structural issues related to AI exploitation and extraction, how bad AI stories have been “memory holed” to aid the hype, and so much more.

You can get a sense of their witty approach to tackling these topics by realizing that when they talk about “synthetic text extruding machines,” it reduces to “STEM.”

We also get their “Discoveries of the Week.”

Visit this page for information about contacting Emily.

Visit this page for information about contacting Alex.

For more information about their book, visit this page.

For more information about their podcast and newsletter, “Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000,” visit this page.

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Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/