Illinois prof interviews 100+ AI experts to counter the hype

John Gallagher, an English professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign affiliated with the School of Information Sciences, has written a book arguing that AI, as practiced day to day, is not what the hype machine says. "It's boring. It's math, a lot of math, and meetings and day-to-day normalcy," he says in a University of Illinois news item announcing the October 8, 2026 release of "AI Through the Experts' Eyes: Communicating Complex Ideas" from University of Pittsburgh Press.

The book draws on interviews with more than 100 AI and machine learning experts, mostly academic computer scientists and physicists, that Gallagher conducted after COVID-19 scuttled his plan to visit research centers in person. His framing swaps science-fiction fears for programming ones. "I'm less concerned with Terminator and HAL 9000 and more concerned with the systematic error that didn't get picked up as a bug in the code, called the alignment problem," he says. His running example is TrashCan, an ocean-cleanup garbage detector that can mistake a buoy, or a stray land animal that ended up in the water, for trash and scoop it up.

Gallagher also lays part of the hype at the feet of the publication pipeline itself. "Now you must advertise the paper on social media. It also needs a blog post, a GitHub repository of the code, shared results on LinkedIn, Bluesky, even YouTube videos," he says. "You can be a researcher and you also have to be a content creator and influencer, producing a conference paper and also six other content genres."