Alex Hanna
Sociologist
Sociologist and director of research at the DAIR Institute, co-author of “The AI Con,” who argues that “AGI” is a marketing fiction and that AI as currently built is fundamentally anti-democratic.
In her words
“AGI” doesn’t even have a concrete definition. It’s a fake thing. It is something that just makes no sense.
AI — as it is constructed right now — is, I think, fundamentally anti-democratic.
Biography
Alex Hanna is a sociologist and the director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), the organisation founded by Timnit Gebru after her ouster from Google. Hanna’s scholarship examines the data pipelines behind computational systems and how they entrench racial, gender and class inequality; she previously worked on Google’s Ethical AI team.
Busting the AI con
In 2025 Hanna and linguist Emily M. Bender published “The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want” (Harper), a systematic take-down of industry marketing. The pair also co-host “Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000,” a podcast and Twitch series that dismantles inflated claims line by line. Their central argument is that “AI hype” is not harmless exaggeration but a narrative that justifies data extraction, surveillance and the deskilling of creative labour.
Hanna is sharply skeptical of productivity claims — she has said there is “no robust data” that large language models make people meaningfully more productive — and urges the public to ask what problem a given AI system is actually meant to solve, and why that problem exists in the first place. Her stance is more structural than technical: she treats “AI” itself as a term too vague to be useful.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/alex-hanna