Episode 51 - Emily M. Bender and 'AI' hype

Lexis

Show notes for Episode 51

Here are the show notes for Episode 51, in which Dan and (new Lexis team member) Raj talk to Professor Emily M. Bender of the University of Washington about:

• Why ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is not really the right term at all

• How Large Language Models work and why we should be sceptical of many of the claims made for them

• The biases inherent in LLMs and what to do about them

• Whether ‘neural networks’ and language processing can shed any light on child language development

• The discourses around ‘AI’: from booster to doomer.

Emily M. Bender’s University of Washington page: https://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/

A great interview from 2023: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

Time Magazine on the ‘machine-learning myth buster’: https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6308275/emily-m-bender/

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 podcast: https://www.dair-institute.org/maiht3k/

Emily’s book recommendations:

‘Babel’, R.F. Kuang: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/babel-or-the-necessity-of-violence-an-arcane-history-of-the-oxford-translators-revolution-r-f-kuang/6627642?ean=9780008501853

‘A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/a-memory-called-empire-winner-of-the-hugo-award-for-best-novel-arkady-martine/219166?ean=9781529001594

Other links from the interview

Jess Dodge’s work: https://jessedodge.github.io/

Batya Friedman & Helen Nissenbaum, Bias in Computer Systems (1996): https://nyuscholars.nyu.edu/en/publications/bias-in-computer-systems

Some further reading:

Police worried 101 call bot would struggle with 'Brummie' accents

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-68466369

BBC News - 'Journalists are feeding the AI hype machine'

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68488924

Bias against African American English

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.00742

Register article: https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/11/ai_models_exhibit_racism_based/

An Al-Jazeera opinion piece about AI and borders:

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/4/20/ban-racist-and-lethal-ai-from-europes-borders

Contributors

Lisa Casey

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ & Twitter: Language Debates (@LanguageDebates)

Dan Clayton

blog: EngLangBlog & Twitter: EngLangBlog (@EngLangBlog)

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social

Jacky Glancey

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackyGlancey

Raj Rana

Matthew Butler

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MatthewbutlerCA

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys