The AI Con
The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna is one of 2026's most credible books, appearing on 1 of the year's most respected lists, including McKinsey & Company, for a Consensus Score of 15 out of 100.
Appears on these lists
Our take
AI-draftedBender and Hanna, a linguist and a sociologist who both left careers scrutinizing machine learning from the inside, are less interested in whether large language models are dangerous than in why so much of what gets marketed as 'AI' is ordinary automation dressed up to look inevitable. The book's central discipline is linguistic: it keeps returning to the gap between statistical pattern-matching and anything resembling understanding.
In the press
“Large language models do not think, and they do not understand.”
The New York Review of Books“The AI Con by Emily M Bender and Alex Hanna review – debunking myths of the AI revolution”
Steven Poole, The Guardian
How the Consensus Score is calculated
Our Consensus Score is our own transparent editorial metric — not a user rating. It weighs each list by the credibility of its source, how recent the listing is, and any award status. Here is the full breakdown.
| Source | Authority | Recency | Award | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| McKinsey & Company | 0.80 | 0.85 | 1.00× | 0.68 |
| Weighted sum → Score | 0.68 → 15 | |||
Similar consensus books
Because they appear on some of the same lists.
Frequently asked
What lists is The AI Con on?
The AI Con appears on 1 list in our 2026 corpus, including McKinsey & Company.
What is its Consensus Score?
The AI Con has a Consensus Score of 15 out of 100, our transparent editorial measure of how many credible lists agree on it.