This week we are leaning into multiple metaphors: AI as a mirror, UX design as a window or room, and life as information. Plus: read about Michael Levin's upcoming presentation at the Imagining Summit, Helen's Book of the Week, and our upcoming events.
It’s easy to fall prey to the design illusion that because LLMs look sleek, they must be well-designed. But aesthetics alone do not equal design. As Steve Jobs once said, “Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.”
It’s curious that these two papers, tackling such similar ideas, came out at the same time. Is this coincidence, or does it tell us something about where the study of life and intelligence is heading?
A conversation with Emily M. Bender, professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington.
We're excited to welcome to the podcast Emily M. Bender, professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington.
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As our listeners know, we enjoy tapping expertise in fields adjacent to the intersection of humans and AI. We find Emily’s expertise in linguistics to be particularly important when understanding the capabilities and limitations of large language models—and that’s why we were eager to talk with her.
Emily is perhaps best known in the AI community for coining the term "stochastic parrots" to describe these models, highlighting their ability to mimic human language without true understanding. In her paper "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots," Emily and her co-authors raised crucial questions about the environmental, financial, and social costs of developing ever-larger language models. Emily has been a vocal critic of AI hype and her work has been pivotal in sparking critical discussions about the direction of AI research and development.
In this conversation, we explore the issues of current AI systems with a particular focus on Emily’s view as a computational linguist. We also discuss Emily's recent research on the challenges of using AI in search engines and information retrieval systems, and her description of large language models as synthetic text extruding machines.
Let's dive into our conversation with Emily Bender.
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The Artificiality Weekend Briefing: About AI, Not Written by AI
