Simpson Center for the Humanities, humanities@uw.edu, 206.543.3920

This event is part of the AI, Creativity, and the Humanities project.

UW Professor Emily M. Bender is one of the leading voices in both public and academic conversations about large language models (LLMs). In this discussion with Anna Preus and Melanie Walsh, Bender will specifically address how LLMs intersect with the humanities and those who care about them. She will discuss how LLMs work, what labor underlies them, and why “AI” is a bad term.

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. She is the co-author of recent influential papers such as “Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data” (ACL 2020) and “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” (FAccT 2021).