AI is more marketing hype than real capabilities, new book suggests

Marketplace Tech

American Public Media

Technology, News

4.6 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The excitement around AI has gotten a bit frothy. Those two magic letters are everywhere, promising everything. Authors Emily Bender and Alex Hanna want us all to take a beat and a more critical look, per their new book "The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want."

Bender is a linguist at the University of Washington who helped popularize the term "stochastic parrots" to describe large language models. And Hanna is the director of research at the Distributed AI Institute, formerly an AI ethicist at Google. She says claims of AI's artistic prowess can be misleading.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Starting a business can be overwhelming.
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1:33.1	Don't believe the hype about AI. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. The excitement around AI has gotten a bit frothy. Those two magic letters are everywhere, promising everything.
2:00.0	Authors Emily Bender and Alex Hanna want us all to take a beat
	...

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