Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her) (emilymbender@dair-community.social)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 14:02:31 JST Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)

   Sitting down for a lunch interview is definitely an interesting experience! Leaving the roughly two-hour conversation with George Hammond, I felt like we'd covered good ground but had no idea what of that would make it into the piece. In the end, I think this covers it pretty well, though I (of course) have a couple of quibbles/some context to add.

   https://www.ft.com/content/9029cc1c-4a3f-42ca-9939-f3ef8e8336ae

   >>

   • Kim Scheinberg and GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her) (emilymbender@dair-community.social)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 14:02:30 JST Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)

     in reply to

     My remark that LLMs were "born shitty" was in the context of a discussion of Cory Doctorow's notion of "enshittification". That process involves something that starts of beneficial for consumers (or at least the consumers in focus). LLMs used as synthetic text extruding machines have no legitimate use cases and --- for all the reasons discussed in the stochastic parrots paper --- are prone to harmful outputs to boot.

     >>

     Rich Felker repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Tony Vladusich (tonyvladusich@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 14:46:56 JST Tony Vladusich

     in reply to

     @emilymbender

     Haha, born shitty and will die eating their own shit.

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 23:04:44 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • cyberlyra

     @emilymbender @cyberlyra Yeah I found it a really sketchy label they put on you.

     Regardless of any original positive meaning, "skeptic" has been coopted to mean "someone who casts bad faith doubt on well supported scientific results" in the contemporary vernacular.

   • Embed this notice
     Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her) (emilymbender@dair-community.social)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 23:04:45 JST Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)

     in reply to

     • cyberlyra

     @cyberlyra Thanks.

     I have lots of issues with the "AI skeptic" framing, starting with the fact that it sets things up as the question under discussion being "is AI real?" rather than "what harms are these companies doing?"

     Rich Felker repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     cyberlyra (cyberlyra@masto.hackers.town)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 23:04:47 JST cyberlyra

     in reply to

     @emilymbender How are you "AI Skeptic" and not "AI EXPERT"?????????????????

     You are an expert. It's not just skepticism. You are in the fray. You study this.

     bffffttttt....

   • Embed this notice
     cyberlyra (cyberlyra@masto.hackers.town)'s status on Sunday, 22-Jun-2025 08:39:18 JST cyberlyra

     in reply to

     @emilymbender
     seriously. Is the little kid who called out the Emperor's lack of clothes a 'skeptic'? I think not.