The hype around artificial intelligence (AI) risks spiraling out of control as claims around the emerging technology escalate into the realm of the absurd. AI is a big-money business, write the authors of the new book, "THE AI CON: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want" (2025), and the marketing fanfare we see is meant to promote the interests of big tech and do one thing: sell AI products.
In this new book, authors Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, and Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, challenge our understanding of what AI is — and what it isn't. Ultimately, they attempt to see through a lot of the overblown claims and sensationalism to understand the true impact AI is having on society.
In this excerpt, the writers grapple with the idea of artificial general intelligence (AGI), the origins of that idea and what the term actually means. In this extract, they argue that the true definitions of AGI and a hypothetical "superintelligence" are fuzzy, at best, and in practice only serve to feed the corporate AI hype machine.
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