Most interviews with Emily and Alex have assumed quite a bit of prior knowledge. This one not so much, so it's a good explainer for laypersons:
Dr. Allison Lester sits down with Dr. Emily M. Bender and Dr. Alex Hanna authors of the AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want for a conversation about what ChatGPT is, what it is pretending to be, and what we lose when we treat it like an all-knowing answer engine.
Together they ask: What is a large language model, actually? Why does “search engine” framing mislead people so quickly? What gets erased when we focus on convenience, from labor and surveillance to environmental cost?
They talk resistance, agency, and the classroom, including why banning is a dead end, how to protect learning without turning teaching into policing, and what it means to be human together in an era of synthetic text.