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It’s easy to talk about benefits justifying the costs when you aren’t the ones actually paying the costs. Not only the tech barons, but also most of their highly paid employees are fairly insulated from the climate crisis, compared to climate refugees, those living in tropical zones, and precarious clickworkers who, even in the U.S., can’t afford air conditioning or easily escape from smoke-choked cities during ever-extending fire seasons.

— The AI Con by Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna (Page 160)

Just because you’ve identified a social problem doesn’t mean LLMs or any other kind of so-called AI are a solution. When someone says so, the problem is usually better understood by widening the lens, looking at it in its broader context. As Shankar Narayan, the Tech and Liberty Project director for ACLU of Washington, asked regarding biased recidivism prediction systems: Why are we asking who is most likely to reoffend rather than what do these people need to give them the best chance of not reoffending? Likewise, when someone suggests a robo-doctor, robo-therapist, or robo-teacher, we should ask: Why isn’t there enough money for public clinics, mental health counseling, and schools? Text synthesis machines can’t fill holes in the social fabric. We need people, political will, and resources.

— The AI Con by Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna (Page 99)

An initial security audit of that tool has shown that, because of the way language models are trained, generated code is uniquely vulnerable to common cybersecurity attacks. Researchers found in testing that 40 percent of Copilot-generated computer programs were vulnerable to some of the most common cybersecurity weaknesses. This is because code generation is made possible due to the repetition of the most common programming idioms in the training data. Those are not the most secure.

— The AI Con by Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna (Page 53)

While executives suggest that AI is going to be a labor-saving device, in reality it is meant to be a labor-breaking one. It is intended to devalue labor by threatening workers with technology that can supposedly do their job at a fraction of the cost.

— The AI Con by Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna (Page 42)

To put it bluntly, “AI” is a marketing term. It doesn’t refer to a coherent set of technologies. Instead, the phrase “artificial intelligence” is deployed when the people building or selling a particular set of technologies will profit from getting others to believe that their technology is similar to humans, able to do things that, in fact, intrinsically require human judgment, perception, or creativity.

— The AI Con by Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna (Page 5)

“Nelson Nunez,” says Ferdy. “Lives up at Bluff Point, about five miles up the coast. But if you visit without an appointment, he’ll kill you. And if you do have an appointment, he’ll probably kill you too, but at least you’ll know when.”

— We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (We Solve Murders, #1) (Page 180)

The only way anyone can afford to buy a house these days is to have bought it fifteen years ago.

— We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (We Solve Murders, #1) (Page 16)

You want redemption? You truly want to redeem?

Then repair what is broken.

— Very Fine People by A. R. Moxon (Page 450)