Hello everyone! Welcome to the AI Skeptics Reading Group. We're reading The AI Con by Dr. Alex Hanna & Dr. Emily M. Bender.

The Ypsilanti group organizing against the University of Michigan/Los Alamos National Laboratory data center (sorry, ahem, "high-performance computing facility", please don't call it a data center (see footnote)) has been in the news recently; read to the end for a link to the great reporting by Matthew Gault at 404media.

Format(s)

As a reminder, there are a few ways to participate and get involved:

• this newsletter: obviously you'll get emails if you subscribe. I'll send emails on Mondays
• video chats: on Thursdays at 8pm ET we'll recap the reading for that week and chat about it (and readings from that week). You can join the video chat at the appropriate time at https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom
• signal group chat for people who would like to chat about the content from this week's readings over text, or who can't participate in video chats. You can join the signal chat here. There are a lot of good conversations in there basically all the time, and I also post reminders, links, and workshop ideas and stuff sometimes.
• social media: I'm on twitter/x, bluesky, mastodon, etc... and I'll post about reading group stuff sometimes.

Schedule

This week I'm reading Chapter 5: "Artifice or Intelligence? AI Hype in Art, Journalism, and Science".

Special guests

For the final week of The AI Con (on Thursday, December 4), we'll be joined by another special guest: Dr. Alex Hanna (she/her). I'll have more to share about Dr. Hanna joining us, but I'm tremendously excited to talk with her as well.

Looking ahead

If you're looking ahead, our upcoming schedule looks like this:

• November 10: Chapter 5 ("Artifice or Intelligence? AI Hype in Art, Journalism, and Science")
• November 17: Chapter 6 ("I'm Sorry, Dave, I'm Afraid I Can't Do That: AI Doomers, AI Boosters, and Why None of That Makes Sense")
• November 24: (Take a break!)
• December 1: Chapter 7 ("Do You Believe in Hope After Hype?" & RECAP) with Alex Hanna

In the news

404Media ran a story about the group organizing against the UM-LANL datacenter. Matthew Gault did an amazing job telling the stories of lifelong residents and other folks who live close to the proposed datacenter site; if you're curious for more background about the group that motivated this reading group, please check out Matthew's reporting here.

Okay, that's all for now; hope to chat on signal, or see you on Thursday!

(PS: "Don't call it a data center.")