Available for pre-order now. HOAXED ships November 30, 2026.

For years the headlines have warned that artificial intelligence is coming for your job, your privacy, and your future. What those headlines rarely mention is who is already benefiting from it. Corporations, wealthy investors, and well-connected professionals are using AI today to save money, move faster, and make better informed decisions, while everyone else is told to be afraid.

Working families can use that same power.

HOAXED: The AI Boogeyman, How Fear Is Sold to Working Families, and the Power They Already Have argues that the fear surrounding artificial intelligence has been oversold, and that the people who benefit most from that fear are rarely the people living paycheck to paycheck. Homer Hartage, author of Family and Professional Guardianship and Parentification, Young Caregivers in Crisis, brings the same practical, plainspoken approach he has used for more than sixteen years helping families through guardianship, caregiving, and crisis to a new kind of family challenge, learning to use a tool that is already reshaping who gets ahead.

This is not a technology manual, and it does not ask readers to trust AI blindly. It is a case for confidence. Hartage walks through the everyday situations where working families are already at a disadvantage and shows, in plain language, how AI can help close that gap. He covers how families can use AI to confront debt and understand repayment options without paying for expensive advice, research major purchases such as cars, homes, and insurance with the same depth of information available to professional buyers, write stronger resumes and cover letters that actually get noticed, and make sense of complicated paperwork, contracts, and government forms that often seem written to confuse rather than clarify. He also shows how AI can help families support aging parents and relatives through healthcare decisions, benefits applications, and caregiving logistics, strengthen or launch a small business without hiring a consultant, and uncover scholarships, assistance programs, and other opportunities that are often hidden behind confusing systems. Each chapter pairs a real challenge families face with a clear, low risk way to put AI to work on it, with no technical background required.

HOAXED also examines how fear itself has become a product. Hartage traces how alarming headlines, vague warnings, and a lack of practical guidance have combined to keep ordinary people on the sidelines while others move ahead. He does not dismiss the real risks that come with new technology. Instead, he makes the case that walking away from a powerful tool does not eliminate risk. It simply guarantees that someone else will be the one holding the advantage.

This book is for parents balancing jobs and caregiving, for young adults trying to get a foothold, for small business owners without a budget for outside help, and for anyone who has felt like artificial intelligence was built for someone else. It is written for readers who are busy, skeptical, and have no interest in becoming “tech people,” only in using every available tool to take care of the people who depend on them.

AI is not only changing the world. It is changing who gets access to capable help. HOAXED makes the case that working families should not wait for permission to use it.

Hardcover. Signed copies available on request.