Researchers and journalists have written some excellent books recently about why Gen AI is so destructive environmentally, economically, culturally, and technologically. Here are some of our recommendations. Please buy these books from an independent retailer, or borrow them from your local library.
The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna
Blurb from their official website:
“A smart, incisive look at the technologies sold as artificial intelligence, the drawbacks and pitfalls of technology sold under this banner, and why it’s crucial to recognize the many ways in which AI hype covers for a small set of power-hungry actors at work and in the world.
Read more…
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, are ‘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.
Bender and Hanna 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.”
Official website: https://thecon.ai/
Bookshop.org for hardcover, eBook, and audiobook: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-ai-con-how-to-fight-big-tech-s-hype-and-create-the-future-we-want-alex-hanna/22044744
Borrow from your local library, via OpenLibrary.org: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL42403270W/AI_Con?edition=key%3A/books/OL59117576M
Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant
Blurb from the publisher:
“The most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley but two hundred years ago in rural England, when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods.
The Luddites organized guerrilla raids to smash those machines—on punishment of death—and won the support of Lord Byron, enraged the Prince Regent, and inspired the birth of science fiction. This all-but-forgotten class struggle brought nineteenth-century England to its knees.
Today, technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are crowding factory floors, and artificial intelligence will soon pervade every aspect of our economy. How will this change the way we live? And what can we do about it?
The answers lie in Blood in the Machine. Brian Merchant intertwines a lucid examination of our current age with the story of the Luddites, showing how automation changed our world—and is shaping our future.”
Official website (from publisher Little, Brown): https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/
Bookshop.org for hardback and audiobook: https://bookshop.org/p/books/blood-in-the-machine-the-origins-of-the-rebellion-against-big-tech-brian-merchant/
Bookshop.org eBook: https://bookshop.org/p/books/blood-in-the-machine-the-origins-of-the-rebellion-against-big-tech-brian-merchant/
Borrow from your local library, via OpenLibrary.org: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL27138995W/Blood_in_the_Machine?edition=key%3A/books/OL58505265M
Brian also maintains a blog that’s critical of Gen AI, which he frequently updates: https://bloodinthemachine.com
Empire of AI by Karen Hao
Blurb from the publisher:
“From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman’s OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy
When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the ‘compute’ power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?
Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.”
Official website (from publisher Penguin Random House): https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/743569/empire-of-ai-by-karen-hao/
Bookshop.org for hardback, eBook, and audiobook: https://bookshop.org/p/books/empire-of-ai-dreams-and-nightmares-in-sam-altman-s-openai-karen-hao/22156498
Borrow from your local library, via OpenLibrary.org: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL42453624W/Empire_of_AI?edition=key%3A/books/OL57607210M
404 Media continues to do excellent Gen AI-skeptical news coverage: https://www.404media.co/tag/generative-ai/
We must mention Brian Merchant’s blog, once again: https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/
His upcoming “AI Killed My Job” series will be here: https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/s/ai-killed-my-job
Tech Won’t Save Us podcast hosted by Paris Marx has lots of Gen AI-skeptical guests on recent episodes: https://techwontsave.us/
AI Now Institute does lots of research that’s critical of Gen AI: https://ainowinstitute.org/
Nightshade application from computer scientists Shawn Shan, Wenxin Ding, Josephine Passananti, Haitao Zheng, and Ben Y. Zhao at the University of Chicago. Using this tool to render your original digital art files may protect your art from DALL-E and similar graphical Gen AI plagues: https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html
Laureen Hudson is a cybersecurity journalist with an excellent new blog. It’s not all about Gen AI, but it’s an easy recommendation: https://cybersecuritea.com/
Check out Neha’s Nebula’s Code blog! A Stop Gen AI member who does machine learning research: https://nebulascode.com/
If you have a book or online resource you’d like to see here, whether it’s yours or someone else’s, please let us know! Email Kim Crawley at kim.crawley (at) stopgenai (dot) com