Author Talk: The AI Con by Alex Hanna

Join us for a discussion of the outsized hype surrounding AI with Alex Hanna, co-author of The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want. Alex will be joined in conversation by Kelly Bronson from the University of Ottawa.

Social Innovation Atelier, 95 Clegg St.
Doors open at 6:30pm, program begins at 7pm.

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, is “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. They show you how to spot AI hype, how to deconstruct it, and how to expose the power grabs it aims to hide. Armed with these tools, you will be prepared to push back against AI hype at work, as a consumer in the marketplace, as a skeptical newsreader, and as a citizen holding policymakers to account. Together, Bender and Hanna expose AI hype for what it is: a mask for Big Tech’s drive for profit, with little concern for who it affects.

Dr. Alex Hanna is the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). Her work examines how new computational technologies—such as AI and machine learning—exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality through their data practices and effects on labor. She also works in the area of social movements, focusing on the dynamics of anti-racist campus protest in the US and Canada.

Dr. Kelly Bronson is a Faculty member at the Centre for Law, Technology, and Society, the Canada Research Chair in Science and Society, and an Associate Professor at the School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ottawa. She studies science-society tensions that erupt around controversial technologies (GMOs, fracking, big data & AI) and their governance.

Co-sponsored by Climate Justice Ottawa.

This event is free and open to all. Please RSVP to help us know how many guests to expect.