Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna
Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna’s new book, The AI Con, published in May 2025 by Harper. Used with permission.
National, regional, and municipal leaders have become enamored by AI hype, in particular by finding ways to offload the responsibilities of government to generative AI tools. This has included providing tools for guidance to their citizens and residents on how to navigate city ordinances and tax codes,
translating asylum claims at the border, and providing massive contracts to companies who say they can shore up the lack of well-trained professionals for public health systems. But synthetic text extruding machines are not well suited to handle any of these tasks and have potentially disastrous results, as they can encourage discrimination,
provide patently wrong advice, and limit access to valid claims of asylum and movement.
In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams (former cop and wannabe tech bro) has thrown resources at technological toys,
with results ranging from laughably ineffective to dangerous. This includes a short-lived New York City Police Department robot that was meant to patrol the Times Square subway station and needed two uniformed human minders to deter would-be vandalizers. Adams and his administration released a broad-reaching “AI Action Plan”
that aims to integrate AI tools into many parts of city government, the centerpiece of which was a chatbot that could answer common questions for residents of the Big Apple.
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