Date/Time
Thursday
2 Oct 2025
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location
470 Stephens Hall
Event Type
Colloquium
Roundtable Participants:
Alex Hanna
Director of Research at Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR)
Co-author of The AI Con, along with co-author Emily Bender, Professor of Linguistics, University of Washington
Timnit Gebru
Founder and Executive Director of DAIR
Technology Reporter, Calmatters
Tamara Kneese
Program Director of The Climate, Technology, and Justice Program at The Data & Society Research Institute
Snacks and beverages will be served at the Roundtable.
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, are “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. For more information please visit the AI Con website.
CSTMS is hosting a roundtable for Emily Bender and Alex Hanna's book The AI Con (https://thecon.ai/). Other members of the roundtable are Tamara Kneese of Data & Society, Timnit Gebru of DAIR, and Khari Johnson of CalMatters.
Please note that there will be copies of The AI Con book available for sale at the event. The books are $20 each and can be paid for by cash, check, Zelle, or Venmo. Please also note that credit card payments will not be accepted.
