Book 19 of 2026: The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Okay, yes — it could be argued that this book is simply reinforcing my existing biases. But it does a damn good job of that! For anyone less than enthusiastic about the AI invasion, and for some who are too enthusiastic but could perhaps be convinced to question their stance, this is an excellent and accessible takedown of the overhyped and existentially problematic push for “AI”.
I only had two issues:
One, that the this area is simply moving so fast that even though the book was just published within the past year (and so written probably mostly in 2024, so even the most current research available while writing would have been from 2023 or 2024), parts of it already feel out of date. Of particular note to me as someone working in education was the “Listen Up, Class” section (in chapter 4, starting on page 93), which begins with a couple paragraphs citing 2023 research claiming that ChatGPT hadn’t made many inroads into student cheating. In 2026 — anecdotally, at least, from what I see and hear about at the college where I work — that is definitely not the current state of things. Students submitting content created by ChatGPT and other genAI systems is a constant battle that teachers are trying to fight and causing serious problems in nearly, if not entirely, every academic department.
Two, that for some reason (apparently a publisher’s requirement, according to a LinkedIn post from Ms. Bender I found), none of the copious endnote references are numbered in the text. The endnotes include notes so that they can be connected back to the main text, but it’s a very odd choice for the publisher to have made. If, as suspected, this was done to make the book more accessible to a mass audience, I kind of wish there was a second edition available for readers not turned off by footnote/endnote notations.
