A profile of Emily M. Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington who co-wrote a paper in 2020 to illustrate what LLMs can and cannot do
Nobody likes an I-told-you-so. But before Microsoft's Bing started cranking out creepy love letters; before Meta's Galactica spewed racist rants … Mastodon: @ben@werd.social , @emilymbender@dair … , @sundress@eigenmagic.net , @dingemansemark@scholar.social , @paul@social.paulkedrosky.com , and @KevinMarks@xoxo.zone Tweets: @_zeets , @_zeets , @mariehermanova , @lucianabenotti , @elizab0t , @musa_algharbi , @davetroy , @pt , and @pt Mastodon: @ben@werd.social : “One fired Google employee told me succeeding in tech depends on “keeping your mouth shut to everything that's disturbing. ” Otherwise, you're a problem. ” … Emily M. Bender / @emilymbender@dair-community.social : Thank you, @lizweil for digging into the topic of “AI” in our current moment and highlighting how humanist (and linguistic) perspectives can bring as society grapples with important discussions. — https://nymag.com/... … Alice Boxhall / @sundress@eigenmagic.net : This is an extremely thorough piece on the *actual* risks of the current generation of “AI”. The final paragraph in particular doesn't pull any punches. — https://nymag.com/... Mark Dingemanse / @dingemansemark@scholar.social : Very nice profile of @emilymbender in this thought-provoking and hard-hitting NY Mag piece — on text generators posing as humans and humans calling themselves parrots https://nymag.com/... #chatgpt #stochasticparrots #nlu Paul Kedrosky / @paul@social.paulkedrosky.com : Good piece on AI ethics, LLMs, humanity, language, and the deterministic boys (mostly) with toys driving things with little regard for consequences. #xp — You Are Not a Parrot — https://nymag.com/... Kevin Marks / @KevinMarks@xoxo.zone : Bender defined... dehumanization as “the cognitive state of failing to perceive another human as fully human... and the experience of being subjected to those acts that express a lack of perception of one's humanity.” … Tweets: Zito / @_zeets : It's incredible how so much tech is built and maintained on cheap and traumatic labor https://twitter.com/... Zito / @_zeets : This reminds me of an old essay on how technologists constantly compare the human brain to whatever is the dominant technology at the time. Once the brain was supposed to be like a clock, then a train, then a computer etc. https://twitter.com/... Marie Hermanova / @mariehermanova : We've learned to make “machines that can mindlessly generate text,” Bender told me when we met this winter. “But we haven't learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” (The best, most nuanced critique of the so-called AI boom that I've read so far!) https://nymag.com/... Luciana Benotti / @lucianabenotti : “LLMs are tools made by specific people [..] It's not about all of us. It's about some of us becoming a superspecies. This is the darkness that awaits when we lose a firm boundary around the idea that humans, all of us, are equally worthy” https://nymag.com/... Elisa Lindinger / @elizab0t : Alright so the LLM topic is kind of exhausted by now but did you know about the trend* of saying SALAMI instead of AI? https://nymag.com/... *and yes I know that it's not a trend, but please let's make it one https://twitter.com/... Musa al-Gharbi / @musa_algharbi : “We go around assuming ours is a world in which speakers mean to say what they say and expect to live with the implications of their words... We've learned to make machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven't learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” https://twitter.com/... Dave Troy / @davetroy : This story is well worth your time. “From here on out, the safe use of artificial intelligence requires demystifying the human condition.” https://nymag.com/... Parker / @pt : I see this sentiment a lot as a way of elevating the perspectives of critics over builders. It misunderstands the situation. Builders get excited about making ideas real & then invest time/money, they don't invest money & then decide to get excited. https://nymag.com/... https://twitter.com/... Parker / @pt : Are you OK, @NYMag? https://twitter.com/...