258 - Guests: Emily Bender & Alex Hanna, Authors, part 2

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .

I am talking with Drs. Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, authors of the upcoming book, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want, and also co-hosts of the live podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000.

Emily is well known for coining the term “stochastic parrots” in a 2021 paper as a label for generative AI. She is a linguistics professor and director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory at the University of Washington and was among the inaugural Time AI 100. Alex is a sociologist who looks at how the data that fuels AI technologies exacerbates racial, gender, and class inequality. She is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies.

In part 2, we talk about the dangers of uncritical naming, anthropomorphizing, Luddites and bespoke crafting, the effects of synthetic content on interpersonal communications, capitalism, and collective action strategies. 

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.