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The 2024 Nelson Series, Learning in the Age of AI, is an exploration of the complex relationship between human and machine learning. Industry experts will help us make sense of how people learn in the age of AI.

“Don’t Try to Get Answers from a Stochastic Parrot”

From major search engine companies providing "AI overviews" and chatbot interfaces to the promise of "AI tutors" to municipalities and organizations providing chatbots as interfaces to rules and regulations, it seems like large language model-driven chatbots are the future of information access. However, Bender will argue that this technology does not fit the task: not only is it unreliable, even if it were reliable it can't support the sense-making that is integral to information literacy.

Emily M. Bender is a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington (Seattle), where she has been on the faculty since 2003. She is also adjunct faculty in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering and the Information School at the University of Washington. In 2022 she was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and in 2023 she was included in TIME's inaugural list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence. She is president of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Bender's public scholarship is focused on helping broad audiences and policymakers understand the technology that is marketed as "artificial intelligence" and on cutting through the hype around AI. Because so much of the technology in question involves language processing, her perspective has been crucial in the ongoing conversation around this technology: as a linguist, she brings knowledge of how language works and an understanding of how people process and react to language. Thanks to Bender's ability to articulate these key points in a way that is accessible and impactful for non-specialist audiences, she has become a go-to voice for the media, appearing in the media on average over twice a week over the past year. She also brings her message directly to the public through her podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, co-hosted with sociologist Dr. Alex Hanna.

This talk is free and open to the public.