Notices by Alex Hanna (alex@dair-community.social)

Indigenous languages are often hidden to LLMs, for good reason. We speak with @keoni, CTO of Te Hiku Media, about his work on Indigenous data sovereignty, and why it’s worth being skeptical when the “AI" industry says it cares about preserving Indigenous languages. From Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000’s latest episode “Big Tech Colon-AI-lism”!

(with @emilymbender)

I'm incredibly excited to announce that I've signed a contract with @themitpress for a new book! It's tentatively entitled NET WORKS, and it's about ImageNet, a dataset of 14 million photos scraped from the web. If it wasn't for ImageNet, we likely wouldn't have "AI" as we currently know it.

I've been thinking about this book for at least five years now, and I'm very excited to finally write it. Thanks to the great folks at MIT Press for helping make it a reality.

Big Tobacco did it first! We speak with scholar and filmmaker @sava about the state of technology in schools, on Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000’s latest episode “Who’s Responsible for ‘Responsible AI’”.

(with @emilymbender)

"We found that at least 150 institutions of higher education – including many small colleges and community colleges – are using Flock’s surveillance network. We also found that many campus police departments have facilitated immigration-related investigations, even when they are located in sanctuary states and are legally prohibited from doing so."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10439463.2026.2702635

TORONTO: tomorrow at 7 PM! I'll be in conversation with Dr. M. Murphy and discussing The AI Con at the Jackman Humanities Institute.

RSVP at https://aiconto.eventbrite.ca.

Today, @DAIR is releasing the Luddite Lab Resource Hub. The hub hosts case studies, resources, and political education for unions, labor organizations, and workers who want to fight “AI” and automation at work.

https://labor.dair-institute.org

THIS WEDNESDAY: join @DAIR as we launch the Luddite Lab Resource Hub, a resource for workers fighting AI at work. We provide strategies for worker-led governance and oversight of this tech through case studies, primers, and a resource library.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/launching-the-luddite-lab-resource-hub-registration-1988317489134?aff=oddtdtcreator

**Pennsylvania Sen. McCormick’s wife works for who now? **Maia Woluchem and Livia Garafolo from Data+Society's Trustworthy Infrastructures program, joined us for episode 74 of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000.

They discuss their recent piece “Pennsylvania Is Perfect” for @newint on the impacts of, and resistance to, the development of data centers in Pennsylvania. 

https://newint.org/science-and-technology/2026/pennsylvania-perfect

(with @emilymbender)

"In many ways, Bender and Hanna successfully demonstrate that AI is a con. It fails at productivity and intelligence, while the hype launders a series of transformations that harm workers, exacerbate inequality and damage the environment."

Nice write-up of The AI Con by Luke Munn in The Conversation.

https://theconversation.com/is-ai-a-con-a-new-book-punctures-the-hype-and-proposes-some-ways-to-resist-257015

@emilymbender

If you're at #FACCT2025 today, check out our AI Workers' Inquiry, where we'll have a stellar panel of workers organizing against AI and host a participatory session. You can also participate online!

https://ai-workers-inquiry.github.io

This week's the week! THE AI CON drops on Tuesday!

You can join @emilymbender and I tomorrow for our Family Action Network book event with @timnitGebru!

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/4117460131670/WN_sX-i6jBNQiKy2MHBvAzTUA#/registration

We also kick off our book tour on Thursday! Check https://TheCon.ai/events for details.

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 is hiring a new podcast producer! Unfortunately Christie is leaving us for greener pastures, but we'd love to have you work with us!

@emilymbender

https://www.dair-institute.org/careers/

Your students aren't safe in little blue enclaves. This is happening in NY, Boston, LA. What plans are you making? How are you using citizen and white privilege to ensure your students aren't abducted by ICE terrorists?

Faculty, postdocs, and other grad students are going to have to protect your international colleagues. We certainly can't expect most universities to do so.

The State Department has said they have revoked visas of more than 300 students. They have been terrorizing hundreds and aim to terrorize hundreds, if not thousands more.

Faculty on here: how are you protecting your international students? Are you connecting with local immigration defense groups? How are you protecting them from being snatched off the street?

https://www.axios.com/2025/03/27/trump-palestinian-hamas-purge-colleges-protests

More praise for THE AI CON:

"A powerful and timely deep dive into what the AI hype cycle is REALLY about, why it’s bound to crash, and what we can all do to protect ourselves from it. An absolute must-read!" - Karla Ortiz

Out on May 13, but you can preorder now!

https://thecon.ai

'a key benefit for the army will be the tool’s ability to rapidly process large quantities of surveillance material in order to “answer questions” about specific individuals...'

'“AI amplifies power,” an intelligence source who has closely followed the [IOF] development of language models.. “It allows operations [utilizing] the data of far more people, enabling population control."'

Why do we need surveillance studies when Unit 8200 just tweets it out?

https://www.972mag.com/israeli-intelligence-chatgpt-8200-surveillance-ai/

"Indeed, two sources in Unit 8200 confirmed that the Military Intelligence Directorate purchased storage and AI services from Microsoft Azure for intelligence-gathering activities, and three other sources in the unit confirmed that similar services were purchased from Amazon AWS."

https://www.972mag.com/microsoft-azure-openai-israeli-army-cloud/

Pre-order alert, cover, and website reveal for our book, THE AI CON! (with @emilymbender)

It's out for release on May 13, 2025!

https://thecon.ai

New open-access paper by Ellen Berrey, Nathan Kim, Kristen Bass, and me over at Socius --

We analyzed over 16,000 news articles using a machine-assisted system, yielding a dataset of 5,553 higher ed protest events, and university and police responses.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231241297447

When Elon bought Twitter, we saw an immense migration from that platform to here.

When Trump got elected, I've seen nothing but increases to BlueSky.

The Fediverse really missed a window.