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#333;">How to Spot AI Hype and Avoid The AI Con, According to Two Experts

"Artificial intelligence, if we're being frank, is a con: a bill of goods you are being sold to line someone's pockets."That is the heart of the argument that linguist Emily Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna make in their new book The AI Con.
It's a useful guide for anyone whose life has intersected with technologies sold as artificial intelligence and anyone who's questioned their real usefulness, which is most of us.
Bender is a professor at the University of Washington who was named one of Time magazine's most influential people in artificial intelligence, and Hanna is the director of research at the nonprofit Distributed AI Research Institute and a former member of the ethical AI team at Google.The explosion of ChatGPT in late 2022 kicked off a new hype cycle in AI.
Hype, as the authors define it, is the "aggrandizement" of technology that you are convinced you need to buy or invest in "lest you miss out on entertainment or pleasure, monetary reward, return on investment, or market share." But it's not the first time, nor likely the last, that scholars, government leaders and regular people have been intrigued and worried by the idea of machine learning and AI.Bender and Hanna trace the roots of machine learning back to the 1950s, to when mathematician John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence.
It was in an era when the United States was looking to fund projects that would help the country gain any kind of edge on the Soviets militarily, ideologically and technologically.
"It didn't spring whole cloth out of Zeus's head or anything.
This has a longer history," Hanna said in an interview with CNET.
"It's certainly not the first hype cycle with, quote, unquote, AI."Today's hype cycle is propelled by the billions of dollars of venture capital investment into startups like OpenAI and the tech giants like Meta, Google and Microsoft pouring billions of dollars into AI research and development.
The result is clear, with all the newest phones, laptops and software updates drenched in AI-washing.
And there are no signs that AI research and development will slow down, thanks in part to a growing motivation to beat China in AI development.
Not the first hype cycle indeed.Of course, generative AI in 2025 is much more advanced than the Eliza psychotherapy chatbot that first enraptured scientists in the 1970s.
Today's business leaders and workers are inundated with hype, with a heavy dose of FOMO and seemingly complex but often misused jargon.
Listening to tech leaders and AI enthusiasts, it might seem like AI will take your job to save your company money.
But the authors argue that neither is wholly likely, which is one reason why it's important to recognize and break through the hype.So how do we recognize AI hype? These are a few telltale signs, according to Bender and Hanna, that we share below.
The authors outline more questions to ask and strategies for AI hype busting in their book, which is out now in the US.Watch out for language that humanizes AIAnthropomorphizing, or the process of giving an inanimate object human-like characteristics or qualities, is a big part of building AI hype.
An example of this kind of language can be found when AI companies say their chatbots can now "see" and "think."These can be useful comparisons when trying to describe the ability of new object-identifying AI programs or deep-reasoning AI models, but they can also be misleading.
AI chatbots aren't capable of seeing of thinking because they don't have brains.
Even the idea of neural nets, Hanna noted in our interview and in the book, is based on human understanding of neurons from the 1950s, not actually how neurons work, but it can fool us into believing there's a brain behind the machine.That belief is something we're predisposed to because of how we as humans process language.
We're conditioned to imagine that there is a mind behind the text we see, even when we know it's generated by AI, Bender said.
"We interpret language by developing a model in our minds of who the speaker was," Bender added.In these models, we use our knowledge of the person speaking to create meaning, not just using the meaning of the words they say.
"So when we encounter synthetic text extruded from something like ChatGPT, we're going to do the same thing," Bender said.
"And it is very hard to remind ourselves that the mind isn't there.
It's just a construct that we have produced."The authors argue that part of why AI companies try to convince us their products are human-like is that this sets the foreground for them to convince us that AI can replace humans, whether it's at work or as creators.
It's compelling for us to believe that AI could be the silver bullet fix to complicated problems in critical industries like health care and government services.But more often than not, the authors argue, AI isn't bring used to fix anything.
AI is sold with the goal of efficiency, but AI services end up replacing qualified workers with black box machines that need copious amounts of babysitting from underpaid contract or gig workers.
As Hanna put it in our interview, "AI is not going to take your job, but it will make your job shittier."Be dubious of the phrase 'super intelligence'If a human can't do something, you should be wary of claims that an AI can do it.
"Superhuman intelligence, or super intelligence, is a very dangerous turn of phrase, insofar as it thinks that some technology is going to make humans superfluous," Hanna said.
In "certain domains, like pattern matching at scale, computers are quite good at that.
But if there's an idea that there's going to be a superhuman poem, or a superhuman notion of research or doing science, that is clear hype." Bender added, "And we don't talk about airplanes as superhuman flyers or rulers as superhuman measurers, it seems to be only in this AI space that that comes up."The idea of AI "super intelligence" comes up often when people talk about artificial general intelligence.
Many CEOs struggle to define what exactly AGI is, but it's essentially AI's most advanced form, potentially capable of making decisions and handling complex tasks.
There's still no evidence we're anywhere near a future enabled by AGI, but it's a popular buzzword.Many of these future-looking statements from AI leaders borrow tropes from science fiction.
Both boosters and doomers — how Bender and Hanna describe AI enthusiasts and those worried about the potential for harm — rely on sci-fi scenarios.
The boosters imagine an AI-powered futuristic society.
The doomers bemoan a future where AI robots take over the world and wipe out humanity.The connecting thread, according to the authors, is an unshakable belief that AI is smarter than humans and inevitable.
"One of the things that we see a lot in the discourse is this idea that the future is fixed, and it's just a question of how fast we get there," Bender said.
"And then there's this claim that this particular technology is a step on that path, and it's all marketing.
It is helpful to be able to see behind it."Part of why AI is so popular is that an autonomous functional AI assistant would mean AI companies are fulfilling their promises of world-changing innovation to their investors.
Planning for that future — whether it's a utopia or dystopia — keeps investors looking forward as the companies burn through billions of dollars and admit they'll miss their carbon emission goals.
For better or worse, life is not science fiction.
Whenever you see someone claiming their AI product is straight out of a movie, it's a good sign to approach with skepticism.
Ask what goes in and how outputs are evaluatedOne of the easiest ways to see through AI marketing fluff is to look and see whether the company is disclosing how it operates.
Many AI companies won't tell you what content is used to train their models.
But they usually disclose what the company does with your data and sometimes brag about how their models stack up against competitors.
That's where you should start looking, typically in their privacy policies.One of the top complaints and concerns from creators is how AI models are trained.
There are many lawsuits over alleged copyright infringement, and there are a lot of concerns over bias in AI chatbots and their capacity for harm.
"If you wanted to create a system that is designed to move things forward rather than reproduce the oppressions of the past, you would have to start by curating your data," Bender said.
Instead, AI companies are grabbing "everything that wasn't nailed down on the internet," Hanna said.If you're hearing about an AI product for the first time, one thing in particular to look out for is any kind of statistic that highlights its effectiveness.
Like many other researchers, Bender and Hanna have called out that a finding with no citation is a red flag.
"Anytime someone is selling you something but not giving you access to how it was evaluated, you are on thin ice," Bender said.It can be frustrating and disappointing when AI companies don't disclose certain information about how their AI products work and how they were developed.
But recognizing those holes in their sales pitch can help deflate hype, even though it would be better to have the information.
For more, check out our full ChatGPT glossary and how to turn off Apple Intelligence.

#666;">المصدر: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/how-to-spot-ai-hype-and-avoid-the-ai-con-according-to-two-experts/#ftag=CAD590a51e" style="color: #0066cc; text-decoration: none;">www.cnet.com

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#333;">By Shoving a Bed Frame Against the Door, This Pompeii Family Tried to Survive Mount Vesuvius' Eruption

New Research
By Shoving a Bed Frame Against the Door, This Pompeii Family Tried to Survive Mount Vesuvius’ Eruption
Archaeologists are learning new details about the four individuals’ futile attempt to hide inside an ancient residence called the House of Helle and Phrixus

A bed frame shoved against the door served as a makeshift barricade.
Pompeii Archaeological Park
In 79 C.E., Mount Vesuvius erupted, spewing ash and small volcanic pellets known as lapilli over the city of Pompeii.
Nearly 1,950 years later, archaeologists are still sifting through the layers of debris and making remarkable discoveries about life—and death—in the ancient city.
Researchers recently discovered four members of a family, including a child, who attempted to escape the eruption by barricading themselves inside a bedroom, according to a statement from the Pompeii Archaeological Park.
Though their efforts were futile, their remains provide remarkable insight into the doomed city’s final moments.
When the eruption began, most residents of Pompeii “had no clue what was happening,” Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the park and co-author of a new study published in the journal Scavi di Pompei, tells the New York Times’ Sara Novak.
“Many thought the end of the world had come.”
A majority of the 15,000 to 20,000 residents of Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum fled and survived the eruption.
The four family members were among the roughly 2,000 Pompeians who remained when the city was destroyed.

As Helle struggles in the sea, Phrixus reaches out to his sister from atop a flying ram.


Pompeii Archaeological Park
Archaeologists found the family’s remains in a small but stately residence known as the House of Helle and Phrixus, named after a fresco of the mythological siblings discovered on the dining room wall.
In Greek myth, the siblings survive their stepmother’s attempt to sacrifice them to the gods by flying away on a ram with a golden fleece.
While Phrixus escapes, Helle falls off the ram into the sea.
The fresco captures the siblings reaching out to each other—Helle in the sea, Phrixus on the ram—in a fittingly futile attempt at rescue.
The architectural features of the house may have accelerated the family’s demise.
Like many Roman houses, the House of Helle and Phrixus featured an open-roofed atrium, intended to aid rainwater collection.
But as lapilli fell from the sky during the first phase of the eruption, the rock debris, which reached up to nine feet in some locations, quickly flooded the house through the atrium.
At first, the archaeological evidence shows, the four individuals tried to protect themselves by packing into a small room.
They even pushed a wooden bed frame against the door, hoping that it would prevent the lapilli from entering.When that failed, the researchers think they pulled back the barricade and attempted to escape.
Based on the location of the remains, they only got as far as the triclinium, or dining room.
“This house, with its decorations and its objects, shows us people who tried to save themselves,” says Zuchtriegel in the statement, per a translation by La Brújula Verde’s Guillermo Carvajal.
“They didn’t succeed, but their story is still here, beneath the ashes.”
Over the centuries, the ash preserved the remains of the family, the wooden bed frame and other items, including a bronze amulet known as a bulla and a stash of amphorae filled with garum, a popular Roman fish sauce.

Ash and lapilli flooded into through the open-roofed atrium, burying the house in up to nine feet of debris.


Pompeii Archaeological Park
Researchers don’t know that this particular family owned the House of Helle and Phrixus.
The group may have taken refuge there after the owners fled, as Marcello Mogetta, an archaeologist and Roman art historian at the University of Missouri who wasn’t involved in the study, tells the Times.
Still, the recovered objects offer a glimpse into Pompeian family life.
For instance, the child was likely the one wearing the bronze bulla, as tradition dictated that boys wear such amulets for protection until adulthood.
Additionally, traces of masonry materials suggest that the house was under renovation.
As Zuchtriegel says in the statement, “Excavating Pompeii means confronting the beauty of art, but also the fragility of life.”
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#666;">المصدر: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/by-shoving-a-bed-frame-against-the-door-this-pompeii-family-tried-to-survive-mount-vesuvius-eruption-180986608/" style="color: #0066cc; text-decoration: none;">www.smithsonianmag.com

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