The Marketing Tricks of "Artificial Intelligence"

0:00People aren't meant to be useful. People are people. And the thing about human rights and human dignity is that we are valuable because we exist, period. And we don't have to justify our existence.

0:30Sam:content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to the best comments and they get early access to our interview series too, like this one. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. Today, I'm here with Alex Hanna and Emily Vendor, authors of The AI Con, How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want, which came out last spring. Unbelievable that it was last spring. It feels like yesterday. Dr. Alex Hanna is a writer and sociologist of technology, labor, and politics. She's the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, also known as DARE, and a lecturer in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

1:08Sam: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. Welcome. It's so good to have you both. I'm so excited that we're here today. It's so fun to be here. It's so fun. Like, I listen to your podcast, so I hear that intro a lot. And it's really fun to hear it as it happens. Well, Joseph does a better job of it. He's got the accent going for him. That's okay. I'm not charmed by that accent, but great to be here, Sam.

1:44Sam:Thank you so much for being here. I will also note that you two host the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 podcast, which you're going to go record one of right after this, which I'll just quote from the description, deflates AI hype and draws attention to the real harms of the automation technologies we call artificial intelligence. Quotes for the people who are not watching on YouTube. I enjoy hearing how this podcast started, so I'm going to ask you how it started. But I was also a huge mystery science theater 3000 dork as a kid. I would say it influenced my sense of humor, maybe for the worst, maybe for the better.

2:22Sam:Hard to say. I will leave that to other people to say. But yeah, do you want to just, before we kind of dive into that and the rest of your work, can you just give us a little bit of background, just kind of the quick how you got here, pitch, how you got into respective fields? How did you get, how did we all get here? And how did you eventually meet each other? Yeah. Oh, this is a fun story. Maybe I'll start by saying my background and then Alex, and then we can get into how we met. But I'm in linguistics and linguistics, broadly speaking, is the study of how language works and how we work with language.

2:52So it is incredibly relevant to the current moment. And I work specifically in computational linguistics, which is about getting computers to deal with language. And starting in about 2016, I started paying attention to what I now refer to as societal impacts of language technology, sometimes called ethics and natural language processing. and that started in large part because actually a former PhD student in my department who's on the advisory board for our program Leslie Carmichael said hey you should have an ethics class in that program I was like oh good idea and then I couldn't find anybody to teach it's like all right I guess I'm doing this and I got organized first basically by learning from people on Twitter this is 2016 so Twitter was still Twitter solidly including Alex and so you know sort of went from there I taught that class for the first time in January 2017, got very concerned with language technology and the ways that language variations of different people speak differently is not being handleable on language technology and sort of all the possible downstream impacts of that.

3:51And also, I noticed in about 2019 that folks in my field were super excited about language models and were making outlandish claims about them understanding. So I started pushing back pretty hard on that. And that led to eventually connecting with Alex, but I'll let Alex tell her background first before we talk about that part. Yeah. I got into this because since the start of my PhD, which I started in 2009, I was really interested in the interaction of tech and society. I did an undergrad degree in computer science as well as sociology. And so I basically found a way to be interested in both of them.

4:30And so I was initially interested in how social movements use social media. And so I had done some early work around Egyptian social movements, especially around the Arab Spring, but even prior to that, and wrote my master's thesis on a movement that used Facebook called the April 6th Movement in 2008. And so then kept on doing a lot of work around social media and politics. Became also more interested in computational social science as a way of studying these movements. So an analysis of social media data, trying to understand how movements seem to engage in discourses online. And then I did my dissertation building a relatively small language model, which said basic classification about features of protests, as mentioned in newspapers.

5:23and the more and more I was doing that work found was more and more concerned about surveillance and the ways that tools like that could effectively be used to identify social movement actors social movement organizations in a systematic way so got very interested in investigating the kind of ethical dimensions of machine learning and things that get looped into AI now and so that That got me more into this fairness, accountability, and transparency space. Went to the first conference in 2018, but also went to a workshop in 2017 organized by my friend Anne-Lauren Hoffman and a few other folks.

6:03And then, yeah, and then also became really interested in the status of data with regards to AI, quote unquote. And then may I'll kick it to Emily to talk about how the podcast got started and how the book got written. Yeah. So in 2020, on the strength of having been interacting on Twitter, Alex and some of her colleagues looped me into a group that was working on some papers, which eventually included AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World benchmark, which is inspired somewhat by the children's book Grover and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Museum. so that was that was really fun to work on um so we were this is 2020 so we're doing this work remotely over zoom and um those papers i think we ended up writing three papers together and then that group was basically done on the academic work and so the zoom meeting stopped and we had a group chat going and we had a couple other group chats with other colleagues and many people among those groups were doing this work of debunking ai hype where we would see hype artifacts and then write like tweet threads sort of making fun of them basically saying this doesn't make sense because and then we came across one that was a video of someone giving a talk and so in one of our group chats I'm like how do you do the debunking when it's a video and our colleague Meg Mitchell says oh well you have to give it the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment so that's where the idea comes from and then a little bit later we came across actually a textual artifact, a long blog post that Medium estimated as a 60-minute read by Google VP Blaise Aguariarchus entitled, Can Machines Learn How to Behave?

7:39And I'm like, this would take so long to do like bit by bit, you know, as a text thread. We got to give this the MSC3K treatment. Who's in? And I have to say, to that point, I had actually not watched the show. I knew the concept, but I hadn't watched it. But Alex, being a big fan of you, was like, I can do it. So you want to pick it up from there, Alex? Yeah, I mean, and so we decided to, well, I was like, well, why don't we do like a Twitch stream? That's something people do, right? And so literally downloaded, I forgot what the software was, it was Streamlabs or something, and downloaded it, and then we tried to do it, and then it immediately ran into sound concerns.

8:15And then I taught myself OBS on the fly, which I don't really suggest doing that. And then... Definitely not. No, it was, I don't know.

8:24Sam:It's the most impressive thing I've heard yet, honestly. I don't know. Degrees and positions aside. Learning OBS in 15 minutes to do a live stream, probably one of my greatest accomplishments. Yeah. And then learned how to do it, did the broadcast, and we did it. And we only got through about 10 minutes of it. And then we did a second and then a third one. And then I kept on doing it. We got to episode eight, then hired a producer. And then we ported all those things to podcasts and now do a stream and a podcast. And then Emily was approached by an agent to consider a book after the, it was a New York magazine or New Yorker.

9:03I was confused at two. New York magazine. Yeah, they did a profile on her. And then Emily looped me in and then we managed to write a book. And then off there, managed to write a book all remotely. And the kicker to all this is Emily was in town in the Bay Area to do an event, which is the great chatbot debate that was held at the Computer History Museum. and it was in March 2025. And after all that, we finally met in person. So basically, closest collaborators. We're up to podcasts. We're recording podcasts 74 today. Three papers, a book, and then all that. And finally met in person in March.

9:41And now we've got to hang out a lot because we're doing fun book events and talk a lot online for things like this.

9:47Sam:Exactly. Love it. Love it so much. Thank you for the quick and dirty rundown. Something that I think is from the book. This is a phrase that you use in the book, ridicule as praxis. I think that's the ethos of the podcast and the show, right? That's kind of the idea here. I find that so refreshing because so much of everything now is really, really depressing. And we need that kind of like refreshing perspective that everything is shitty and getting shittier. but to paraphrase another great thinker of our time but uh i would say the ridiculous practice concept is really important um i'll just quote straight from the book if it's not too cringe to quote your book in front of you um resisting a resisting hype can also be empowering grounding and even joyful it's empowering to reaffirm the value of our skills and expertise it is grounding to lean into the value of human to human connection of being human together and it can be flat out fun to find the silliest excuses of the hype machine and deflate it with, deflate it, with deflate it, defeat and deflate, with ridicule as praxis.

10:54Sam:I love that so much. And I think that's something that keeps me doing the work that we do at 4.4 is kind of the subtext of all of the stories that we're writing is, you know, people are pushing back against this stuff and people are saying, it's still important to be human. We're not just going to roll over and say, sure, the machines can take over. So I would love to kind of hear more about that. But what does that mean to you as people who coined that term but also are doing that work every day? Yeah. So this is great. And also, just to give a shout out to y 'all, I did a search through the book in our extensive endnotes.

11:27I think there's 55 pages. And I believe y 'all are cited 12 times, if I counted correctly. I mean, so we rely, we really, really rely on your reporting, which is fucking phenomenal. And it's so important. And y 'all, I just, I think are really punching above your weight for just like the size of your team and the amount of, the amount of stuff that you cover. So just like kudos to y 'all. And then I think, so ridiculous practice, I have the honor, like I came up with that term and I think like, and I'm very proud of it. But I was speaking at a panel with an author. I love Carmen Maria Machado.

12:09And I said ridiculous practice. And she cackled. And I think that I was like, oh, I can die now. Someone who's poetics I really appreciate liked a phrase of mine. We're done. Yeah, but I think that the kind of ethos of it is like so much of what we encounter. And I'm sure y 'all get this as well. Like, it's really depressing. It's just, you know, like these are, and in my lowest moments, I'm like, these are the worst people in the world that have the most money that's ever been had. And like, how does it feel? You know, like, what can we do right now? And we get this question a lot too, which is like, how do you actually slog through this?

12:45This stuff is like terrible. And it is like, you got to make fun of it. you have to really engage in it and really engage in creating joy with other people and really sorting through it. Because otherwise, it's just infuriating and it is really maddening. And it's people just... I mean, like we do on the podcast, people who are in these fields just say the stupidest shit. They are making the most ridiculous claims. We had Adam Becker on the show, and hopefully the podcast with him will be out before this one is out. I don't know the timelines. But basically, Adam is a physicist. He's got a physics PhD, and he wrote a great companion book, More Everything Forever.

13:30And one of the things that we were talking about is data centers in space. and the kind of claims are made on the spacex site where like space is great to put a great place to put data centers because it's cold and and it's like okay it's cold but it's also a vacuum and vacuum is a fantastic insulator and that is and you're not going to have this natural diffusion of heat or dissipation of heat because of coldness of space and the thing is like yeah like Elon Musk makes these claims because people think he's smart but no it's ridiculous and it ought to be made fun of and we need to punch up and use humor to deflate these claims so I mean ridiculous practices and ethos has worked pretty well and keeps us sane as well for sure for sure we do periodically these episodes that we call all hell episodes where we go through like 25 to 30 things rapid fire and on the one hand it's a lot of terrible on the other hand, it's really cathartic to sort of like go through all of that and laugh at it.

14:31What's been really important to me about the podcast is the way it has sort of catalyzed a community. We found that the people who listen, especially our live stream viewers, often tell us they thought they were the only ones. Everyone around them seemed to be taken in by this and they felt very isolated. And so by basically planting a flag, you know, and doing our ridiculous praxis, we've sort of created some ground for people to come together and meet. And that has been awesome. And I'm reminded of, I gave a talk at UW a couple of weeks ago to a large audience, including students and members of public and faculty.

15:05And this one student said, how do I refuse and resist without being a stick in the mud? I'm like, no, be a stick in the mud, right? Because if you're a stick in the mud, you're sort of creating space that can sort of solidify solid ground that other people can come stand on with you. And I think that that's like the serious back end of the ridiculous praxis is that we are saying, no, we're standing firmly on our understanding of truth here so firmly that we can make fun of them and you can come join us here.

15:31Sam:I love that so much. Yeah, get a little eco-culture, restorative marshland in this thing. Be a stick. Be a stick. Exactly. I love that so much. Yeah, so I guess just to back up a little bit because maybe there are people, I feel like 404's audience is familiar with a lot of these topics because of what we write about. But for people who are listening and are like, what are they talking about? What are these terrible things? Why do they keep saying air quotes around AI?

16:01Sam:I guess maybe the first question that we need to kind of establish is like, why do we keep saying AI in air quotes? Like, why is AI not? Why is AI part of AI hype as a marketing ploy? Yeah, so it is a marketing term. One of the things I've learned from Alex as a sociologist is always be historicizing. So we go back to the origins of the term, which is part of a 1956 grant proposal by John McCarthy and colleagues. So written in 1955, where they were trying to get some money to basically hang out with some friends for the summer and do some things they wanted to work on. And so they needed a word that they could apply to sort of loop it all together.

16:38And so they called it artificial intelligence. And we actually have a fun sort of throwback episode of our podcast where we go through that document and apply ridiculous praxis. But it basically from the start was basically a way to say, give us money. And it's doing the same thing now. And the fact that there's sort of two ways that the term itself is doing the hype. One is that it draws on notions of intelligence. That is something that is supposedly shared between humans and machines where you can rank people and then rank the machines. And there's a whole horrible history that we can get into over there.

17:11But also, when you lump together chatbots and image generators and license plate readers and protein folding algorithms and chess playing engines and so on as one thing, then it sounds like it is one thing that is, in quotes, smart and, in quotes, getting smarter. and the sort of illusion of cognition or intelligence that we get from the synthetic text coming out of the chatbots is then also papered over everything else. And it starts to seem like maybe it would be a good idea to use this in quotes, artificial intelligence to make consequential decisions. Yeah. And I think that's the, it's very helpful.

17:47And we're following a few other folks here. I mean, there's a great essay from Emily Tucker from the Center for Center of Privacy and Technology at Georgetown. And the essay is called Artifice and Intelligence. I think it's Artifice and Intelligence. And it's effectively why they're saying, you know, they're not going to use the term AI or even machine learning, basically because they want to be very exact about the technology that they use. This is a place that has produced some really helpful things like the perpetual lineup, more it's focusing on facial recognition. and I think there's a way that it's pretty helpful to distinguish between this.

18:28And I mean, if we talk about something like Flock and say Flock is AI-enabled, well, what is Flock actually doing? Well, Flock is an automated license plate reader, right? And then if they have a partnership with ShotSpotter, I don't know what ShotSpotter's new name is, what is that doing? It's audio classification of trying to distinguish between gunshots and fireworks or whatever. And so it's helpful to understand what those are because it gives you a little bit more insight about what the technology is and what it can and can't do. And I think the companies have done a lot of work to paper over those differences.

19:03And just to say, you can feed any kind of modality into ChatGPT and it's going to tell you what this is. And it really obscures what's happening under the hood. And for some things, we know what's happening under the hood, like large language models. We're assuming that multimodal things are basically doing this kind of pattern matching and then doing some kind of transformation. But it makes sense to distinguish because it helps us be more precise about where to critique and how to critique, and also to interrogate what kinds of automations could be desirable if constrained in a certain way and what kinds of automations should not be used in any way, shape or form.

19:43Sam:Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and I think a lot of the insidiousness of AI when it's used by these really big companies such as Flock that are trying to gain footholds wherever they can, especially in the US, it makes it all sound very inevitable and very just like Flock is everywhere, AI is everywhere. What is AI? We don't know. But, you know, it's in Flock and Flock is in your town. And I think Flock especially is a good example of that not being true necessarily because people have fought back against it and kicked it out of their towns, kicked it out of their counties or not allowed it to be partnered with local police and their counties to begin with because they feel empowered by knowing what it does, knowing that they don't want that and that they know that it's an overreach and an overstep that they don't want in their communities and saying, no, we're not going to fund this.

20:33Sam:It's not allowed here, which I think is the work of AI as AI marketing as an inevitable sort of like all-encompassing thing is probably one of the more scary things to me.

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23:44Sam:Both of you were on the AI Inside podcast with Jason Howell and Jeff Jarvis recently. I think it was a couple of months ago, maybe. It wasn't that recent. It was right after the book came out. But you talked about, I was just like, I'm going to do some more historical research and catch up on what they've been up to before we talk today. Thanks. Appreciate it. Some people don't even read the book. I mean, they should for many reasons, but especially if they're going to talk to you. But yeah, I was pleasantly surprised to hear one of the things that was talked about on that show was a story that I wrote in 2024 about bars and sages.

24:20Sam:is um and i think that's an interesting like micro micro example of of ai being talked about and then being being pushed back against and used in a way that it's just like kind of runs over everything else and why you might say oh we don't want this it's it's destroying things that we actually like and value um so in that story if people aren't familiar bars and stages was a it's now defunct which we'll get into but it was a small indie press and the founder the quote that they pull in this in AI inside is the problem with AI is the people who use AI they don't respect the written word is what the founder of Bards and Sages who's talking about shutting down their company their beloved indie press they're people who think that their ideas are more important than actual craft of writing so they turn out all these ideas and enter their idea prompts and think the output is the story but they never learn bothered to learn the craft of writing which out of context is kind of pretentious in itself it's like someone someone's talking about the craft of blank i'm kind of like okay what are we actually talking about um but you correctly know during this conversation that this is out of context and it's not just some like bitter ai hater this is someone whose work um who coincidentally does uh speculative fiction and role-playing games shuttered their publisher after 22 years.

25:40Sam:And the final straw was this influx of AI-generated submissions. So I would love to just kind of touch on the idea, because this is something that we still hear all the time, this idea that AI will democratize art and writing. I know. And that people who can't paint will suddenly be given the gift of art by using mid-journey. And people who can't write, it's like everyone should be, you know, given the ability to write at the same level as everyone else. And you should let your ideas be democratized by AI. So let's unpack that a little bit. Yeah, I have a couple of stories there. First of all, I am now allergic to this word democratized because democracy means shared governance, right?