This article is an excerpt adapted from the book The AI Con: How To Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna (Copyright © 2025 by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna). Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

As long as there’s been research on AI, there’s been AI hype. In the most commonly told narrative about the research field’s development, mathematician John McCarthy and computer scientist Marvin Minsky organized a summer-long workshop in 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, to discuss a set of methods around “thinking machines”. The term “artificial intelligence” is attributed to McCarthy, who was trying to find a name suitable for a workshop that concerned a diverse set of existing knowledge co

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