Emily M. Bender (ChatGPT expert) is a linguist, a scholar of the societal impact of language AI and a professor at the University of Washington where she’s director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory. She recently became internet-famous for her no-nonsense, almost comical, papers that criticise the hype around large language models (LLMs) and ChatGPT. Her message is: Don’t believe the tech bro’ hype; it’s spin!

In this chat we cover whether AI can take over the world; the real motives behind Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s excited calls for an “AI pause”; where longtermism, the singularity, effective altruism, pro-natalism and transhumanism (I’ve covered these in previous eps and on my Substack) all fit into the palaver; plus what we really should be terrified about. This is a thoroughly important and correcting conversation.

SHOW NOTES

I flag this explainer that I wrote on my Substack: Say it isn’t so: Human Eugenics

You can read Emily’s papers “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” and the “Octopus Paper” 

Here’s the Statement from the listed authors of Stochastic Parrots on the “AI pause” letter

Emily also wanted to point everyone to this paper on AI Safety vs. AI Ethics

And if you want to do more of a deep dive into all this, check out her podcast

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

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