Dr. Alex Hanna, author of The AI Con, in conversation with Dr. M. Murphy

Dr. Alex Hanna is a writer and sociologist of technology, labor, and politics.

She is the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). Her work examines how new computational technologies–such as AI and machine learning–exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality through their data practices and effects on labor. She also works in the area of social movements, focusing on the dynamics of anti-racist campus protest in the US and Canada. She holds a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics and a BA in Sociology from Purdue University, and an MS and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

With Emily M. Bender, Dr. Hanna is the co-author of The AI Con (Harper, 2025), a book about AI and the hype around it. They also run the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 series, playfully and wickedly tearing apart AI hype on their livestream and podcast. She has published widely in top-tier venues across the social sciences, including the journals Socius, Sociological Science, Mobilization, American Behavioral Scientist, and Big Data & Society, and top-tier computer science conferences such as CSCW, FAccT, and NeurIPS.