In 2022, the Swedish digital bank and fintech giant Klarna laid off 700 permanent staff, hoping to replace the expertise and energies of hundreds of employees with a single, rational AI assistant that would apparently handle millions of different consumer conversations in dozens of languages.

Yet the bots didn’t work out; almost immediately, customers began complaining of constant glitches and of finding themselves stuck in ‘loops’ on the app, where they simply could not get the answer they wanted. Soon, Klarna had to admit their mistakes, returning to hiring human staff this year — but still took the opportunity to move to a precarious employment model where workers are given ‘remote and flexible’ zero-hours contracts for the sake of the company’s profiteering.

This is hardly the only instance of stories of corporate greed being enabled by AI hype, and new stories with familiar features continue to emerge daily. As such, the release of Emily M Bender and Alex Hanna’s The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want is a timely, welcome moment.

For concerned onlookers and those affected, the book is a necessary read to understand and push back against the increasingly unhinged behaviour of corporations and governments in imposing AI systems on our society. As a trade unionist in the Communication Workers Union’s United Tech and Allied Workers branch, we have experience of CEOs salivating at the prospect of being seen to reduce headcount and increase productivity with what they are told to call ‘AI’.

Press releases often amount to nothing, nor is any evidence presented when they are held to account on their claims. Shareholders and investors are starting to wake up, but the workforce is still left often feeling like they are on the back foot, being told without evidence that their bosses have seen a fantastical future that doesn’t involve them.

The AI Con is right to point out from the off that as a term, AI has always been little more than mere marketing. AI ‘isn’t sentient, it’s not going to make your job easier, and AI doctors aren’t going to cure what ails you’, Bender and Hanna write. ‘What the hype will do is make your work harder and more precarious’.

Crucially, the book continually returns to the question of who benefits, pointing out that that hype over AI isn’t an accidental or spontaneous moment: rather, it fulfils a function of scaring (and therefore disciplining) workers and contains the offer for bosses of securing lots of money.

Throughout The AI Con, Bender and Hanna analyse the origins, deployment and impact of AI hype with great depth (and humour). With clarity and force, they conclude that AI is a shoddy replacement for human labour and relationship-building, a tool for clumsily replicating without attribution a vast array of creative work from assigning public housing to investigating child neglect. But the book isn’t merely ‘ridicule-as-praxis’, the authors assert: we discover the real harm of AI, and what’s being done to fight back.

What’s behind the moment of AI hype, The AI Con asserts, are big tech lobbyists directed to heighten the cash piles of billionaires. Nothing they offer is coherent nor truly ‘intelligent’, but rather a series of different kinds of automation often bundled together to appear more cohesive and ground-breaking than they really are.

This AI snake oil is then boosted by a client journalism that feeds poison into public discourse and the corridors of corporate and political power; for legislators and bosses, a sense is construed that is sensible to be ‘working on AI’, and that by doing so you are innovative, intelligent, and even ‘getting ahead’ of ‘inevitable change’.

This fundamental question of greed is handled throughout The AI Con. AI has proven to be a great cover for greed-based decisions in business operations — or, more specifically, how you treat your workers. As with the example of Klarna, we’ve seen CEOs make bold press announcements about cutting thousands of jobs to make way for AI, with decisions made in the hope that peers and shareholders perceive them to be technologically and financially savvy.

But we are now a few years into this speculative bubble, and this promised paradigm has begun to rapidly unravel. Are people beginning to wake up to this situation? To some degree. For example, we know that investment in AI from venture capital firms is declining. Simply sprinkling AI glitter to boost your stocks is no longer impressing investors in the same way. CEOs too are realising that at some level, there is a disconnect between what was promised and what was delivered.

But raising the alarm with the greatest consistency has been those workers who have known this situation all along. Despite long sounding the alarm about AI’s damaging aspects, they have been listened to the least and affected the most. If they’ve not lost their jobs to AI, work is often more stressful and miserable. The AI Con brings particular attention to more ominous forms of AI being used to discipline workers, such as text and audio-visual surveillance being introduced to workplaces — an urgent consideration for trade unionists who need to be alive to this situation and be ready to resist it.

As authors, Bender & Hanna don’t merely describe ongoing events but offer solutions and the vision of a different future where AI — whatever that even means — isn’t inevitable. We don’t have to accept nonsense sold to us about AI: we can ridicule it as a thinking public, and resist its implementation through our strength as organised workers. Bosses and policymakers would prefer AI to carry on unabated, because to be opposing an ‘innovation curve’ damages fragile egos. But we as workers do not have to accept that.

In giving factual weight and the confidence to encourage this refusal, The AI Con is a remarkable achievement. At once a source of demystification of AI for the recently concerned and an intervention which encourages veteran sceptics to sharpen their criticism, it serves as a call to action to ridicule AI hype as a consumer, argue against it as a citizen, and resist it as a worker.