Artificial Intelligence has too much hype. In this podcast, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna break down the AI hype, separate fact from fiction, and science from bloviation. They're joined by special guests and talk about everything, from machine consciousness to science fiction, to political economy to art made by machines.
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You Talked to Workers for This Labor Research... Right? (with Sophie Song), 2025.11.17
Episode 67
Tuesday, December 2, 2025 • Duration 53:14
Last month, Senate Democrats warned that "Automation Could Destroy Nearly 100 Million U.S Jobs in a Decade." Ironically, they used ChatGPT to come to that conclusion. DAIR Research Associate Sophie Song joins us to unpack the issues when self-professed worker advocates use chatbots for "research."
Sophie Song is a researcher, organizer, and advocate working at the intersection of tech and social justice. They’re a research associate at DAIR, where they're working with Alex on building the Luddite Lab Resource Hub.
Music by Toby Menon. Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park. Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.
Drag It All To Hell, 2025.10.27
Episode 66
Tuesday, November 18, 2025 • Duration 56:44
It's been six months since our last all-Hell episode! In honor of Halloween season, we take a long journey into the very scary Fresh AI Hell mines. Topics include terrifying uses of AI in education, scientific research, and politics — plus, some delicious palate cleansers along the way.
"Like Magic Intelligence in the Cloud", 2025.05.26
Episode 58
Friday, June 20, 2025 • Duration 59:50
Because Sam Altman hates opening his laptop, OpenAI is merging with iPhone guy Jony Ive's design firm in the name of some mysterious new ChatGPT-enabled consumer products: Alex and Emily go full Mystery Science Theater and dissect the announcement video. Plus how tech billionaires like Sam Altman mythologize San Francisco while their money makes it less livable for everyone else.
The "AI"-Enabled Immigration Panopticon (with Petra Molnar), 2025.05.05
Episode 57
Wednesday, May 28, 2025 • Duration 01:01:58
This week, Alex and Emily talk with anthropologist and immigration lawyer Petra Molnar about the dehumanizing hype of border-enforcement tech. From hoovering up data to hunt anyone of ambiguous citizenship status, to running surveillance of physical borders themselves, "AI" tech is everywhere in the enforcement of national borders. And as companies ranging from Amazon, to NSO Group, to Palantir all profit, this widening of automation threatens a future of faceless human rights violations with no attempts at accountability of any kind.
AGI: "Imminent", "Inevitable", and Inane, 2025.04.21
Episode 56
Wednesday, May 14, 2025 • Duration 01:05:02
Emily and Alex pore through an elaborate science fiction scenario about the "inevitability" of Artificial General Intelligence or AGI by the year 2027 - which rests atop a foundation of TESCREAL nonsense, and Sinophobia to boot.
It's been 4 months since we've cleared the backlog of Fresh AI Hell and the bullshit is coming in almost too fast to keep up with. But between a page full of awkward unicorns and a seeming slowdown in data center demand, Alex and Emily have more good news than usual to accompany this round of catharsis.
"AI" Agents, A Single Point of Failure (with Margaret Mitchell), 2025.03.31
Episode 54
Thursday, April 17, 2025 • Duration 01:03:02
After "AI" stopped meaning anything, the hype salesmen moved on to "AI" "agents", those allegedly indefatigable assistants, allegedly capable of operating your software for you -- whether you need to make a restaurant reservation, book a flight, or book a flight to a restaurant reservation. Hugging Face's Margaret Mitchell joins Emily and Alex to help break down what agents actually are, and what to actually worry about.
Linguists Versus 'AI' Speech Analysis (with Nicole Holliday), 2025.03.17
Episode 53
Wednesday, April 2, 2025 • Duration 01:00:28
Measuring your talk time? Counting your filler words? What about "analyzing" your "emotions"? Companies that push LLM technology to surveil and summarize video meetings are increasingly offering to (purportedly) analyze your participation and assign your speech some metrics, all in the name of "productivity". Sociolinguist Nicole Holliday joins Alex and Emily to take apart claims about these "AI" meeting feedback tools, and reveal them to be just sparkling bossware, with little insight into how we talk.
Nicole Holliday is Acting Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley.
Quick note: Our guest for this episode had some sound equipment issues, which unfortunately affected her audio quality.
The Anti-Bookclub Tackles 'Superagency', 2025.03.03
Episode 52
Wednesday, March 19, 2025 • Duration 01:00:00
Emily and Alex read a terrible book so you don't have to! Come for a quick overview of LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman's opus of magical thinking, 'Superagency: What could possibly go right with our AI future' -- stay for the ridicule as praxis. Plus, why even this tortuous read offers a bit of comfort about the desperate state of the AI boosters.
The War on Knowledge (with Raina Bloom), 2025.02.24
Episode 51
Wednesday, March 5, 2025 • Duration 01:00:23
In the weeks since January 20, the US information ecosystem has been unraveling fast. (We're looking at you Denali, Gulf of Mexico, and every holiday celebrating people of color and queer people that used to be on Google Calendar.) As the country's unelected South African tech billionaire continues to run previously secure government data through highly questionable LLMs, academic librarian Raina Bloom joins Emily and Alex for a talk about how we organize knowledge, and what happens when generative AI degrades or poison the systems that keep us all accurately -- and contextually -- informed.
Raina Bloom is the Reference Services Coordinator for University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries.
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