Deconstructing AI Hype: A Playbook for Resistance

Contemporary AI development is accompanied by widespread industry-led hype: speculative narratives that portray AI as transformative, inevitable, and urgently necessary. Dominant accounts diagnose the problem of hype in terms of the inaccuracy of its claims, and propose increased technical and sociotechnical literacy as the response. In this paper, we provide a materialist deconstruction of AI hype, examining its political-economic functions rather than assessing its scientific validity. We show that AI hype is a problem not because it misdescribes AI, but because it facilitates AI entrenchment—the concentration of power and resources in the AI industry, rapid proliferation of AI across sectors, and lack of democratic agency over AI’s trajectory. Based on an analysis of the tactics used by AI hypers, we argue that the appropriate response to AI hype is not literacy, but contestation: undermining hypers’ legitimacy and building collective power to pursue alternative trajectories for AI. We contribute a playbook of tactics for this contestation, illustrated by ongoing movements against AI entrenchment. Although there is no simple solution for resisting AI hype and the AI entrenchment it enables, collectively these strategies can produce a meaningful challenge that shifts the balance of power over AI futures.

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