Challenging AI Hype and Tech Industry Power

Online Book Talk ⋅ June 6 2025

Challenging AI Hype and Tech Industry Power

Emily M. Bender
Alex Hanna
Karen Hao
Moderated by Tamara Kneese

“I think it’s very important to maintain that refusal is an option.”

– Emily M. Bender

“AI is not inevitable. AI – as it is constructed right now – is, I think, fundamentally anti-democratic.”

– Alex Hanna

“One of the features of empires is that they’re made to feel inevitable. [But] throughout history every single empire has fallen…as much as they seem strong, they’re very weak at their foundations because they are built off of extraction and exploitation.”

– Karen Hao

Description

Artificial intelligence is not magic or sentient; it does not even describe one coherent set of technologies. In two new books, Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna, and Karen Hao explore how AI instead serves as a powerful marketing tool for tech giants who have a product to sell and profits to rake in. On June 6 — in a conversation moderated by Tamara Kneese, director of Data & Society’s Climate, Technology, and Justice program — these authors explored AI’s impact on our environment and society, and the motivations of the tech elite that build and shape it.

In The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna break down and reconstruct our understandings of so-called AI, exposing and upending AI hype in its many forms. Beginning by explaining how these technologies actually work, they go on to investigate attempts to use AI tools in government, law, healthcare, journalism, art, and beyond — and the damage being done amid broken promises about the technology’s capabilities. Ultimately, they show how outlandish claims about AI’s potential and dangers alike are manufactured and perpetuated by the very billionaires who stand to gain the most from a free market embrace of AI.

In Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, Karen Hao offers the inside story of OpenAI as a lens for understanding the tech elite’s extraordinary seizure of power and its threat to democracy. Hao finds that the success of the massively disruptive sector requires an almost unprecedented amount of resource extraction: materials, data, human labor, and a truly alarming spike in energy and water use. Drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents a full picture of AI and its impact, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed.

Speakers

Emily M. Bender | Bluesky: @emilymbender.bsky.social | Mastodon: @[email protected] | Twitter (X): @emilymbender

Dr. Emily M. Bender 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 and affiliate faculty 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. She is frequently consulted by policymakers, from municipal officials to the federal government to the United Nations, for insight into how to understand so-called AI technologies.

Alex Hanna | Bluesky: @alexhanna.bsky.social | Twitter (X): @alexhanna

Dr. Alex Hanna is director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) 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 who has been featured across the media, including in the Washington Post, Financial Times, The Atlantic, and Time.

Karen Hao | Bluesky: @karenhao.bsky.social | Twitter (X): @_KarenHao

Karen Hao is an award-winning journalist covering the impacts of artificial intelligence on society. She writes for publications including The Atlantic and leads the Pulitzer Center’s AI Spotlight Series, a program training thousands of journalists around the world on how to cover AI. She was formerly a reporter for the The Wall Street Journal, covering American and Chinese tech companies, and a senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review. Her work is regularly taught in universities and cited by governments. Hao has received numerous accolades for her coverage, including an American Humanist Media Award and American National Magazine Award for journalists under 30. She received her bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from MIT.