The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want
You’re invited to The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want - a workshop and talk by Dr. Alex Hanna
Zine and Button Making: March 28, 2025, 2-4pm, WALC 3007 (Knowledge Lab)
Workshop: April 2, 2025, 4:30-5:30pm, BCC MP2
Keynote Lecture: April 3, 2025, 4:30-5:30pm with Q&A 5:30-6pm, HCRN 1066 (Honors Hall)
The Tech Justice Lab invites you to attend a workshop and talk by Dr. Alex Hanna. Dr. Hanna is the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, a former AI ethics expert at Google, and a Purdue Aluma. In the workshop and keynote lecture, we’ll learn about Dr. Hanna’s new book, The AI Con, and learn how to spot AI hype, how to deconstruct it, and how to expose the power grabs it aims to hide.
The workshop will take place on Wednesday, April 2, 2025, 4:30-5:30pm in BCC MP2 (RSVP Required). The keynote will take place on Thursday, April 3, 2025, 4:30-5:30pm with Q&A 5:30-6pm in HCRN 1066 (Honors Hall). The keynote lecture will also be available over Zoom.
Additionally, prior to Alex Hanna's visit, there will be a Zine and Button Making Event in the Knowledge Lab (WALC 3007) on Friday, March 28, 2-4pm. Drop in or stay the whole time as we use zines and buttons to explore and challenge AI Hype.
This series is sponsored by the Tech Justice Lab, Anthropology, Agriculture, Black Cultural Center, Digital Humanities, Governance & Responsible AI Lab, Health & Human Sciences, John Martinson Honors College, Knowledge Lab, Libraries, and Students for Tech Justice.
About the Talk
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, Dr. Hanna responds, is: “no,” “they wish,” “LOL,” and “definitely not.”
This kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype.” Hype 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 this talk, Dr. Hanna discusses her book The AI Con, (coauthored with Dr. Emily M. Bender), which offers a sharp, witty, and wide-ranging take-down of AI hype across its many forms. Armed with tools from the book, 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, we expose AI hype for what it is: a mask for Big Tech’s drive for profit, with little concern for who it affects.
About Alex Hanna
Dr. Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). A sociologist by training, her work centers on the data used in new computational technologies, and the ways in which these data exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality. She also works in the area of social movements, focusing on the dynamics of anti-racist campus protest in the US and Canada. She holds a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics and a BA in Sociology from Purdue University, and an MS and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dr. Hanna is the co-author of The AI Con (Harper, 2025), a book about AI and the hype around it. With Emily M. Bender, she also runs the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 series, playfully and wickedly tearing apart AI hype for a live audience online on Twitch and her podcast.
She has published widely in top-tier venues across the social sciences, including the journals Mobilization, American Behavioral Scientist, and Big Data & Society, and top-tier computer science conferences such as CSCW, FAccT, and NeurIPS. Dr. Hanna serves as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies and sits on the advisory board for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. She is also recipient of the Wisconsin Alumni Association's Forward Award, has been included on FastCompany's Queer 50 (2021, 2024) List and Business Insider's AI Power List, and has been featured in the Cal Academy of Sciences New Science exhibit, which highlights queer and trans scientists of color.
Learn more about her and her work on her website.