{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "description": "A book of and for our current societal and technological moment. Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna are the experts we need and can trust to write this. It's essential, it's critical and it's both easy to comprehend and hard to put down. We have what's sold as AI which, well, is not that. It is artificial, it is not intelligent. It's marketing, it's hype and it preys on the collective acceptance of new technology always representing progress and inevitability. But this is neither progress nor inevitable. It's a set of utilities being marketed as a cure-all to justify obscene validations for a set of technologies that are not cost-effective relative to the benefits they provide. It's a bubble. Bender and Hanna are sarcastic throughout, referring to text generating technologies as \"synthetic text extruding machines\" and similarly diminishing image generating technology. They dispel the myth that these things are at all intelligent. We ascribe intelligence to them because they spit out plausible sounding language and art cobbled together from training data they've greedily helped themselves to without regard for the creators that they're exploiting. All these technologies seek to do (but perhaps do not claim to do) is deskill workers, make people redundant and move ever more wealth upwards to their obscenely wealthy creators and investors. Grandiose claims please investors, but the reality is perpetually disappointing. You can ask a chatbot a question and it will always seek to please you. It won't hallucinate, it's not capable of hallucinating. It's bound to give you an answer and will make up utter nonsense in order to do so. Do any of these shortcomings matter? They should but — for managers and businesses — they may succeed in deluding themselves that unreliable output is enough to cut labor costs and provide a substantially worse outcome for customers. AI companies promise things they can never deliver. They exploit poorly paid contractors to tune models (a human in the loop? A human getting traumatized moderating this nonsense in the loop?). The next big thing is perpetually around the corner — we just need more money, energy and data. It's all bullshit. We're sprinting full speed towards a cultural wasteland filled with gobs of dull, meaningless text, stolen and utterly mediocre images (not art) and an internet filled with worthless slop. The text is often wrong, the images are all dull and easily identifiable as the garbage they are and do little more to crowd out real art in favor of a cultural wasteland. It's more but it's more crap . Art doesn't need to be democratized, not everyone is an artist and that's quite alright. There's no meaning to anything this technology produces. It's all probabilistic outcomes intended to respond to a prompt. It's unthinking, it's uncaring and it's devoid of the nuances that make human communication unique and valuable. It's automation for the sake of it and by people that care about the automation, not what they're automating and devaluing in the process. : Aaron Swartz was destroyed for this, these companies are celebrated for it.",
  "path": "/reading/books/0063418568/the-ai-con",
  "publishedAt": "2025-05-21T00:00:00Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:sttgf52vkk46f6yuknvqxvgh/site.standard.publication/self",
  "tags": [
    "ai",
    "tech",
    "nonfiction"
  ],
  "title": "The AI Con"
}