Emily Bender and Alex Hanna on AI
2 quotes from Emily Bender and Alex Hanna on the wall, 2025, newest first. Each one is verbatim and links to where it was said. Sources include Mind Matters, Mail & Guardian.
From Emily Bender and Alex Hanna's 2025 book The AI Con, quoted in a Mind Matters essay by Erik J. Larson arguing AI is not a mind.
What it refers to
The claim that today's AI systems are fundamentally automation rather than a thinking mind.
Other voices
- Today's AI is just automation, nothing moreErik J. LarsonWriter4 September 2025
- Even the best systems available today lack anything that could be called intelligenceEmily BenderResearcher30 June 2025
- Statistics and machine learning in action, with nothing mystical behind itTeppo FelinResearcher21 November 2025
- These models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than peopleIlya SutskeverBuilder27 November 2025
Synthetic text extrusion machines
From Emily Bender and Alex Hanna's book 'The AI Con', cited in a 2025 Mail & Guardian opinion piece arguing that large language models are not intelligent.
What it refers to
This is Bender and Hanna's alternative term for large language models like ChatGPT, rejecting the idea that they are intelligent.
Other voices
- Even the best systems available today lack anything that could be called intelligenceEmily BenderResearcher30 June 2025
- Large language models are about mimicking peopleRichard SuttonResearcher26 September 2025
- They live in the land of correlations between images and text, not in the land of ideasGary MarcusResearcher31 August 2025
- We're less special than we thoughtGeoffrey HintonResearcher30 August 2025
- It appears that we're less unique than we previously thought we wereGašper BegušResearcher31 October 2025
Mail & GuardianNever mind the botlickers, ‘AI’ is just normal technology