The AI Con cover art

The AI Con

How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends December 16, 2025 11:59pm GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

The AI Con

By: Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna
Narrated by: Jade Wheeler
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends December 16, 2025 11:59pm GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Only £0.99 a month for the first 3 months. Pay £0.99 for the first 3 months, and £8.99/month thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Start my membership

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing the real harm these technologies do to our jobs, health, society and environment, who stands to gain from them, and how to fight back.

Is AI going to take over the world? Have scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to replace all our jobs, even creative ones, like doctors, teachers and care-workers? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything?

The answers to these questions, as the expert authors of The AI Con make clear, are 'no', 'they wish', 'LOL', and 'definitely not'. In fact, these fears are all symptoms of the hype being used by tech corporations to justify data theft, motivate surveillance capitalism, and devalue human creativity so they can replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines. Meanwhile, across healthcare, education, media, government and law-enforcement, ‘AI’ products are already being introduced that are unreliable, ineffective, unjust and dangerous.

Packed with real-world examples, pithy arguments and expert insights, The AI Con arms you to spot AI hype in all its guises, expose the exploitation and power-grabs it aims to hide, and push back against it at work and in your daily life.

©2025 Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna (P)2025 Penguin Audio Business Ethics Computer Science Corruption & Misconduct History & Culture Machine Theory & Artificial Intelligence Politics & Government Technology & Society Workplace & Organisational Behavior Technology Health Care Government Leadership Capitalism

Listeners also enjoyed...

 AI Snake Oil cover art
Gilded Rage cover art
The Hour of the Predator cover art
The Optimist cover art
Blood in the Machine cover art
Homo Criminalis cover art
Taming Silicon Valley cover art
The AI Mirror cover art
How Progress Ends cover art
How to Think About AI cover art
The Tech Coup cover art
Agentic Artificial Intelligence cover art
The Essentials of AI Deep Learning and Neural Networks cover art
AI Engineering cover art
The World of the Cold War cover art
Tomorrow Is Yesterday cover art

Critic reviews

With their expansive, interdisciplinary expertise, Bender and Hanna write with absolute authority and unapologetic clarity about all the ways AI companies wield and weaponize language — in their marketing hype and as training data for their monstrous AI models — to create a less rigorous, less verifiable, more unequal and more BS-filled world. Despite the depressing nature of their subject, Bender and Hanna narrate it with incredible wit and verve . . . Come for the piercing observations; leave with the tools to slice your way through the absurdist narratives that prop up the AI industry and to hold it accountable (Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI)
A powerful and timely deep dive into what the AI hype cycle is REALLY about, why it's bound to crash, and what we can all do to protect ourselves from it. An absolute must-read! (Karla Ortiz, artist and artist activist)
The AI Con is a must-read . . . Drs. Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender cut through the dizzying hype to provide the clearest picture yet of what AI is, what it is not, and why none of us need to accept it being shoved down our throats. Their expertise and independence from the tech companies claiming to have created what the CEO of OpenAI calls 'magic intelligence in the sky', makes them two of the few voices writing on this topic motivated by the public’s interests rather than their personal gains (Timnit Gebru, Founder and Executive Director at The Distributed AI Research Institute)

In The AI Con, Bender and Hanna deliver a hard-hitting, no-nonsense takedown of the so-called 'artificial intelligence revolution'. Far from the sci-fi fantasy of machines thinking for themselves, this book shows how tech giants are using AI as a cover for their real agenda: data exploitation, surveillance and a race to replace human labour with soulless automation. With irreverence and razor-sharp analysis, Bender and Hanna dismantle the hype and arm readers with the tools to see through the corporate doublespeak. This isn’t just about debunking myths — it’s about reclaiming control over the future that’s being sold to us (Ruha Benjamin, author of Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want)
If you've been confused and bedazzled by all the chatter about AI, this book will help you make sense of all of it. Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna break down all the science-fictional flights of fancy, and painstakingly reveal the troubling reality that lies beneath. The AI Con is required reading for anyone who wants to survive the twenty-first century (Charlie Jane Anders, author of Victories Greater Than Death)
All stars
Most relevant
The recording quality is bad. Makes enjoying the audiobook difficult. There should at least be a required level of audio quality.

Dreadful recording quality

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The AI Con is a great book that really helped me see through all the AI hype. I’m a startup guy, and I had jumped into a few AI projects just because it felt like everyone else was doing it and I didn’t want to miss out. After reading this, I realized I was chasing hype, not real value, and decided to drop those projects. Thanks for helping me stay grounded.

A great book to see through all the AI hype

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I believe the current AI tech will be a net negative to humanity so I was predisposed to agree with this book. I did agree with it and it gave me a wider lens and provided me with better arguments to deploy. I was hoping I could recommend this book to my AI advocating friends but I don’t feel they would find it compelling. Maybe that’s an unfair criticism but it’s why I only gave 4/5. I found the performance somewhat grating. The delivery had an air of aloof smugness that undermined the content.

Solid content

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Some super interesting points and I learnt a lot even as an AI Technician. I heard a different viewpoint and look forward to hopefully listening to a follow up book. I’m politically neutral so was somewhat alarmed by the overt far left politics in the book.

Some super information and interesting view points, but too much far left political propaganda.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I came to this book in the hope that it might present some arguments against the underpinning logic and workings of LLMs and artificial neural networks, however these weren't forthcoming (other than the general slogan that they are 'stochastic parrots' - itself a fairly well parotted rote response). Instead, the book is made up primarily of suggestions that AI firms are generally amoral and more interested in selling fictitious functionality than the real thing, for profit (though as above, very little argument to suggest we're dealing with the former over the latter). Undoubtedly, they are pushing sales, but that's circumstantial evidence at best - as are the book's several examples of AI failures at perfection.

In one laughable instance, the authors suggest AI is inherently racist because it relies on the notion of intelligence and it's measurement, which have historically been applied to racial difference. That's the level of argument here. It's also written very smuggly and with gratingly unfunny asides. Not recommended.

More social campaigning than argument

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.