Wreading Wednesday: AI and I

I’ve been reading more about AI lately trying to get my feet set in the rapidly developing conversation. On my flight to the east coast I read Emily Bender’s and Alex Hanna’s The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want (2025) which occasionally gets cited as a good place to start thinking about AI in critical ways. I liked the book in the same way that I like a good cup of coffee. It can be very, very good, and it might even be necessary, but in the end it is just a cup of coffee. To be more clear: I very much enjoyed their take no prisoners attack of the AI hype machine. It amused me that the called generative AI “synthetic text extruding machines” and tickled my interest in such extruded material as polystyrene. It nudged me to think whether all text isn’t “synthetic” in some way; perhaps there is a distinction between “natural language,” which is characterized (metaphorically at least) by organic development, and “synthetic language” which is presumably…