THE AI CON

The bots probably aren’t going to kill you, but they’re probably not going to save you, either.

Linguist Bender and sociologist Hanna, the founders of a merrily debunking podcast about all things AI, write that there’s hoopla aplenty about how AI will make our lives better—or perhaps worse. In an opening salvo, they write, gamely, “each time we think we’ve reached peak AI hype—­the summit of bullshit mountain—­we discover there’s worse to come.” There are real concerns, of course, especially for people of color, whom AI facial recognition algorithms are altogether too likely to identify as crime suspects and who are likely to be judged risky candidates for pretrial release if they’ve been charged. Those “daily harms being done in its name” are more profound than a feared robot apocalypse, as are other sequelae of AI: the replacement of human workers with machines, the shredding of career tracks with gig work, the collapse of creative industries. (Actually, the authors add, AI probably won’t replace your job, “but it will make your job a lot shittier.”) Those holding that AI promises a shining future for all are selling just as much of a bill of goods as the doomsayers. AI—or, better, its antecedent, machine learning—has done some useful things along the way, the authors allow, but on a relatively modest scale: spell-checking, for instance, and advances in medical image processing. Those who buy into the end-of-the-rainbow stuff are courting trouble, they add, such as a lawyer who let ChatGPT write a brief for him that turned out to be so full of holes as to land him in front of a judge. The con of which they write is more comprehensive still, though, based on errant machine-driven financial speculation, data and IP theft, the deprecation of human skills, and other clear and present dangers.

A refreshingly contrarian take on AI and the clouds of hyperbole surrounding it.