Oxford University Press Deceitful Media: Artificial Intelligence and Social Life after the Turing Test

Artificial intelligence (AI) is often discussed as something extraordinary, a dream―or a nightmare―that awakens metaphysical questions on human life. Yet far from a distant technology of the future, the true power of AI lies in its subtle revolution of ordinary life. From voice assistants like Siri to natural language processors, AI technologies use cultural biases and modern psychology to fit specific characteristics of how users perceive and navigate the external world, thereby projecting the illusion of intelligence. Integrating media studies, science and technology studies, and social psychology, Deceitful Media examines the rise of artificial intelligence throughout history and exposes the very human fallacies behind this technology. Focusing specifically on communicative AIs, Natale argues that what we call "AI" is not a form of intelligence but rather a reflection of the human user. Using the term "banal deception," he reveals that deception forms the basis of all human-computer interactions rooted in AI technologies, as technologies like voice assistants utilize the dynamics of projection and stereotyping as a means for aligning with our existing habits and social conventions. By exploiting the human instinct to connect, AI reveals our collective vulnerabilities to deception, showing that what machines are primarily changing is not other technology but ourselves as humans. Deceitful Media illustrates how AI has continued a tradition of technologies that mobilize our liability to deception and shows that only by better understanding our vulnerabilities to deception can we become more sophisticated consumers of interactive media. Review 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 capit