If you can think back to the news five years ago, you may remember the name Emily Bender. In 2021, Bender presented a paper, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” co-authored with Google researcher Timnit Gebru and others at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency[1] that Google tried to block from publication, part of a sequence of events leading to Gebru departing from Google. Wikipedia explains the paper concerned ethical issues in building natural language processing systems using machine learning from large text corpora.[24] Since then, they say, she has invested efforts to popularize AI ethics and has taken a stand against hype over large language models.The Bender Rule, which originated from the question Bender repeatedly asked at the research talks, is research advice for computational scholars to “always name the language you’re working with”.

She draws a distinction between linguistic form versus linguistic meaning and has argued that tools like ChatGPT have no way to meaningfully understand the text that they process, nor the text that they generate.

Now with sociologist Alex Hanna as co-author she has published a new and topical book: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want.

 Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world, she asks. Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of business? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything?

The answer to these questions, linguist Emily M. Bender makes clear, are “no,” “they wish,” “LOL,” and “definitely not.” This kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype”. Hype looks and smells fishy: It twists words and helps the rich get richer by justifying data theft, motivating surveillance capitalism, and devaluing human creativity in order to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines. In The AI Con, Bender and Hanna offer a sharp, witty, and wide-ranging take-down of AI hype across its many forms.

Bender and Hanna claim that if they show you how to spot AI hype, how to deconstruct it, and how to expose the power grabs it aims to hide you will be prepared to push back against AI hype at work, as a consumer in the marketplace, as a skeptical newsreader, and as a citizen holding policymakers to account. Together, Bender and Hanna expose AI hype for what it is: a mask for Big Tech’s drive for profit, with little concern for who it affects.

About the Image

The intimacy factory 1’ reflects on the increasing use of ‘companion bots’; conversational bots designed to mimic human-like conversations. It references these systems’ synthetic and mechanical qualities, as well as their very real emotional impacts. These systems manufacture intimacy, creating the illusion of bi-directional attachment and even care. The image is compiled in Photopea and includes extracts from four public domain images.