Deceitful Media

a real breath of fresh air ... fundamental reading for an understanding of AI as a socio-material phenomenon * Domenico Napolitano, Prometheus *
Deceitful Media makes a compelling case that the development of artificial intelligence is inextricably woven together with fallacies of human perception. Analyzing archival documents from the 1950s onward, Simone Natale demonstrates the prevalence of what he calls 'banal deception,' the everyday taken-for-granted interactions that attribute human-equivalent intelligence to algorithmic processes that in themselves are quite different. A remarkable achievement, this accessible and well-written book is a 'must-read' for media scholars, cultural critics, and anyone interested in the significance of artificial intelligence for our time. * N. Katherine Hayles, author of Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational *
From the time of Alan Turing's Game of Imitation, the benchmark of machine intelligence has been deceptive communicative behavior. In Deceitful Media, Simone Natale provides a decisive and revealing analysis of the history, significance, and social consequences of deception in artificial intelligence, demonstrating how and why deceit is not a bug to be fixed but a defining feature of both the theory and practice of AI. * David J. Gunkel, Northern Illinois University *
A fundamental fear surrounding artificial intelligence is that it will one day become a technology of deception. As Simone Natale informs us in Deceitful Media, that day is already here. However, such deception is not the malicious kind of science fiction; rather, the deceit of AI is one enacted in our minds as they encounter technologies carefully crafted to our social nature. By situating AI within the context of media and communication theory, Natale dispels the hype surrounding AI as a technology, replacing it with a theoretical lens informed by the seemingly mundane elements of our ongoing interactions with AI as forms of media. As a result, Deceitful Media provides us with not only a new way to think about AI, but also a more grounded approach to assessing its impact for ourselves and society. * Andrea Guzman, Northern Illinois University *
A remarkable critical history of the artifice central to artificial intelligence. Natale has peered beyond the scandalously uncanny valleys, the many muddily mediated human-machine thought experiments, and scurrilous bids for grants and investor capital to uncover the dark heart of artificial intelligence: namely, the everyday ordinary ways that 'banal deception' is integrated into our lives. In so doing, Deceitful Media offers pressingly ethical, sober, and sophisticated pathways to reclaiming the unnatural ordinariness of the human psyche in the shadow of artificial intelligence. Highly readable and deeply instructive. * Benjamin Peters, University of Tulsa *