Voices on AI: The AI Con & Fighting Big Tech's Hype with Dr. Emily Bender

In this episode, I’m hosting one of the authors of the awesome book The AI Con, Dr. Emily M. Bender. Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Linguistics and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Computer Science and the Information School at the University of Washington. Her research interests include multilingual grammar engineering, computational semantics, and the societal impacts of language technology. In her public scholarship, Bender brings linguistic insights to lay audiences to cut through the hype about "AI" and facilitate understanding of the actual functionality of the systems being sold under that name.

In this conversation, we discuss: 

• how language shapes our understanding of AI

• the dangers of synthetic text generation

• accountability in tech companies

• the importance of human connection

• how chatbots exploit our natural language processing

• the environmental costs of large language models

• how to stay connected with our humanity even with the rise of this new technology

Emily M. Bender: So the phrase artificial intelligence is a marketing term, it doesn't refer to a coherent set of technologies. We can look at the various technologies that are currently being sold as artificial intelligence and separate them based on what they're meant to do, like what is the function of that particular piece of software? One of the things that linguists can do in the world is sort of point out when people are lumping things together on purpose, right? The phrase artificial intelligence was coined in 1955 by John McCarthy and a few others who were trying to get some money from a foundation to fund some work for the summer. They wanted a flashy word that would bring together a bunch of projects they wanted to work on so they could get this money. So it's continually being used as a marketing term, and so when we can point that out, we can reclaim some power.

Listen to the full conversation on the InnerCalling Podcast here. 

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