Notices by Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her) (emilymbender@dair-community.social)

How should we handle it when the AI bubble bursts? On the next MAIHT3k livestream, Matt Scherer joins me and @alex to discuss how we can avoid bailing out billionaires.

Monday, June 1, noon PT
https://twitch.tv/dair_institute

I appreciate this op-ed by my UW colleague Tomas Rocha in the Seattle Times today, calling out our state office of public education for its weak sauce "AI" policy.

https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/wa-schools-ai-policy-doesnt-take-the-stakes-seriously-enough/

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Look, I hate pointy-clicky interfaces as much as the next Gen-Xer (let me use the keyboard, dammit) but it is so weird to reduce the important, and importantly effortful, work of navigating the information ecosystem to the apparent drudgery of clicking on links that are (*shudder*) blue!!!

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Here is where it really starts to show that this journalist is just lightly paraphrasing a press release. "Links will become an afterthought," will they? What is your evidence for that confident statement about the future?

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Spot the magical thinking here. No, the "AI" isn't making sense of anything. It's making papier-mache of the input, and preventing the use from doing the sense-making.

Also, is that the Pokemon sense of "evolution"?

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But all the academic papers in the world showing why something is a bad idea won't stop companies from doing it, if it's profitable and/or fits into their quasi-religious beliefs that "AI" is the future, alas.

So let's look at what Google is up to now, or at least says they are, via TechCrunch as stenographer:

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Not satisfied to cut people off from the important sense-making of looking at information in its context and finding and navigating different perspectives (what "AI overviews" do), Google also wants to tell you what to search for:

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How infantilizing --- you thought you were looking to find something that someone else wrote on the web. But woah! Now you've been "dropped into" an "interactive experience". Yeah, Google can just fuck right off with that.

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Wow some terrible reporting about Google's latest horrible ideas about how to distort information access in the name of "convenience" (or something):

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/

A short thread
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5 years ago (2021) Google researchers Metzler et al put out a preprint talking about how LLMs would change information access ("Rethinking Search"). It was full of TERRIBLE ideas, and Chirag Shah and I wrote a reply ("Situating Search"):

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3498366.3505816

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We followed a couple of years later with further arguments about, inter alia, protecting the information ecosystem:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649468

While Nora Lindemann was writing about similar ideas:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-024-01944-w

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"Predictably, the huge spike in productivity that these companies claim their own AI products have enabled hasn’t resulted in more or better products, shorter work weeks, or better consumer experiences."

https://www.404media.co/software-developers-say-ai-is-rotting-their-brains/

Hey it's the book's birthday!

Happy 1st Birthday to our book @alex :)

The AI Con has been out in the world for a whole year.

🎂🎂🎂

https://thecon.ai

Some reflections on frequently unasked questions about stochastic parrots (the phrase and the paper):

https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/stochastic-parrots-frequently-unasked-questions-49c2e7d22d11

Timeline cleanse!

“‘AI’ might not be good for xyz, but you can’t deny that it’s helpful for programming” -- sound familiar? On the next Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, @alex and I will be digging into that bullshit. Join us for the livestream:

Monday, May 11, noon PT
https://twitch.tv/dair_institute

Usually, when I get interviewed for a piece on something like "AI consciousness" I am relegated to the skeptics box --- some short paragraph near the end. So it is a nice change to see this piece by Holly Baxter

https://www.the-independent.com/tech/ai-news-humanize-chatbot-conscious-b2963788.html

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I have been sharing the Magic 8 Ball analogy for a while now, but I think this is maybe the first time it's made it to print:

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Really proud to have been a part of this paper, with Rob Squizzero, Martin Horst, Alicia Beckford Wassink, Alex Panicacci, Anna Kristina Moroz and Kirby Conrod!

Check it out for how to conceptualize "race" and "ethnicity" in linguistic research. Spoiler alert: it's not something that can be addressed with word choice at the very end.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0097850726000093

RE: https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/116450850556202127

The responses to this post (replies, quotes) paint a really bleak picture of a medical system in which providers are pushed to use this software and/or buy into the idea that it is a suitable way to keep up with impossible work loads, and patients in turn are pressured to accept it, lest they get labeled problematic/denied appropriate care.

I wonder if any journalists are looking into this. Would love to see coverage from e.g. @404mediaco