Learning and Laughter on Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000
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Post by Charles Logan
We are living through a time of heightened despair, and it’s tempting–and sometimes necessary–to retreat from the daily onslaught of cruelty unleashed by Donald Trump and his sycophants. In education, news of Big Tech offering cash prizes to teachers and students for using their AI products and scenes of Big Tech CEOs heaping praise onto Donald Trump are enough to make one (me) scream (again) into the abyss. That screaming is cathartic–and it’s exhausting. And so it’s vital and revitalizing to be reminded by Dr. Emily M. Bender and Dr. Alex Hanna that the work of resisting AI hype “can also be empowering, grounding, and even joyful.” Bender and Hanna make the case for critical joy throughout their book The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want. They teach us that it’s “fun to find the silliest excesses of the hype machine and deflate it, with ridicule as praxis.”
I can confirm: ridicule as praxis is a lot of fun. I know because I had the opportunity to join Dr. Bender and Dr. Hanna for an episode of their program Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 (MAIHT3K). You can listen to the episode or even watch the recorded livestream. (And no, my wardrobe choice was not a coincidence. I wanted to channel Dr. Chris Gilliard and his evergreen observation that, “Every future imagined by a tech company is worse than the previous iteration.” The quote is also featured in the Civics of Technology “Technology Quotes Activity”.) For those unfamiliar with the program, Hanna and Bender describe MAIHT3K as a place where they and their guests “break down the AI hype, separate fact from fiction, and science from bloviation.” I’ve come to appreciate MAIHT3K as a public pedagogy project that models the kind of critical AI literacy that we need for attending to the ways power reproduces itself through different rhetorical strategies and pathways. Bender, Hanna, and their guests help their audience learn how to call bullshit on AI hype and its purveyors–and that collective act of ridicule feels good.
In fact, I was so excited by MAIHT3K’s pedagogical possibilities that when Dr. Sepehr Vakil and I redesigned our undergraduate course AI, Equity, and Public Education, I used the MAIHT3K model to revise the final project. We asked students to form small groups, identify examples of AI hype in education, and then record themselves “drawing on our course material and class discussions to call out the hype, point to the possibility, and leave your audience with a more nuanced understanding of how you believe AI can and cannot (and maybe should or should not) support teaching and learning in K-12 education.” You can read the details of our MAIHT3K-inspired final project for more information.
I took my own turn bursting the AI hype education bubble during my time with Dr. Bender and Dr. Hanna on MAIHT3K. We focused our ire on three artifacts: 1) “Welcome to Campus. Here’s Your ChatGPT” by Natasha Singer in the New York Times; 2) “AI isn’t replacing student writing – but it is reshaping it” by Jeanne Beatrix Law in The Conversation; and the American Federation of Teachers’ press release announcing the union was entering into a partnership with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic to launch the National Academy for AI Instruction. I invite you to come listen to the episode and stay for Dr. Hanna’s riff on the song, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” with lyrics about chatbots in classrooms for a good laugh.
My time with Dr. Hanna didn’t end with our recording of MAIHT3K. Two weeks later, Dr. Hanna graciously visited our Civics of Technology book club on The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want. You can read our questions for Dr. Hanna, key quotes from the book, and additional resources that we gathered.
Yes, Melania Trump is leading an AI education initiative supported by Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education. And, yes, Sam Altman is throwing his full support behind the Trump Administration, saying Trump’s “‘pro-business, pro-innovation’” presidency is “‘going to set us up for a long period of leading the world, and that wouldn’t be happening without your leadership.’” All that–and more, so much more–makes for a very bleak time to be alive. And yet: we continue to band together to fight the attempts of private industry and their powerful allies to capture education, and as Dr. Bender and Dr. Hanna help us to understand, we can and should resist with laughter.