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Emily M. Bender

Professor of Linguistics, University of Washington · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

academicscientistauthorhost@emilymbender ↗linguistics.washington.edu/people/emily-m-bender ↗Wikipedia ↗

Emily M. Bender is a computational linguist who co-authored the 2021 paper 'On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?'. She also co-hosts the podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 and co-authored the book The AI Con.

11statements → 3claims → 3claims resolved → 67%fully supported → 3.91/5average certainty → 3.18/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated →

2 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 assertions · 3 opinions · 5 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Emily argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Bender says Microsoft abandoned net-zero carbon goals because of generative AI
“I would say that we've got Brad Smith at Microsoft giving up on the plans to become a net zero carbon since the beginning of Microsoft, and he said this ridiculous thing about we had a moonshot to get there, and turns out with generative AI, the moon is five t…”
Emily M. Bender May 14, 2025 ▶ 10:49 AI’s Drawbacks: Environmental Damage, Bad Benchmarks, Outsourcing Thinking

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
50% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Emily M. Bender on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

Everything Emily M. Bender said on Big Technology that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Bender: ChatGPT only mimics language form and fails genuine information needs
“What ChatGPT can do is it can mimic human language use across many different domains. And so it can produce the form of a poem. It can produce the form of a travel itinerary. It can produce the form of a Wikipedia page on the history of some event. It is an ex…”
Emily M. Bender May 14, 2025 ▶ 24:10 AI’s Drawbacks: Environmental Damage, Bad Benchmarks, Outsourcing Thinking
Opinion
Bender says large language models are parlor tricks exploiting human perception
“Right down at the bottom, you've got the fact that especially large language models are a technology that is, that's a parlor trick. It plays on our ability to make sense of language and makes it very easy to believe there's a thinking entity inside of there.”
Emily M. Bender May 14, 2025 ▶ 1:05 AI’s Drawbacks: Environmental Damage, Bad Benchmarks, Outsourcing Thinking
Assertion Partly supported
Bender says AI search queries use 30 to 60 times more compute
“Each of those tokens has to be calculated individually, and so it's coming out one word at a time, and that is far more expensive. I think her number is somewhere between 30 and 60 times more expensive, just in terms of the compute, which then scales up for el…”
Emily M. Bender May 14, 2025 ▶ 5:34 AI’s Drawbacks: Environmental Damage, Bad Benchmarks, Outsourcing Thinking
Assertion Supported
Bender says Microsoft abandoned net-zero carbon goals because of generative AI
“I would say that we've got Brad Smith at Microsoft giving up on the plans to become a net zero carbon since the beginning of Microsoft, and he said this ridiculous thing about we had a moonshot to get there, and turns out with generative AI, the moon is five t…”
Emily M. Bender May 14, 2025 ▶ 10:49 AI’s Drawbacks: Environmental Damage, Bad Benchmarks, Outsourcing Thinking
Insight
Bender says most AI benchmarks fail to measure actual capabilities
“Most of the benchmarks that are out there are not reasonable. They lack what's called construct validity, and construct validity is this two-part test of the thing that we are trying to measure is a real thing, and this measurement correlates with it interesti…”
Emily M. Bender May 14, 2025 ▶ 14:30 AI’s Drawbacks: Environmental Damage, Bad Benchmarks, Outsourcing Thinking
Opinion
Bender argues AI bioweapon risks are speculative fiction distracting from real harms
“Bad actors could use it to, you know, more quickly design, you know viruses and stuff like that. That's still speculative, right? So anytime we are taking the focus away, it's like, has that happened? Right? This is still people writing science fiction, fan fi…”
Emily M. Bender May 14, 2025 ▶ 58:32 AI’s Drawbacks: Environmental Damage, Bad Benchmarks, Outsourcing Thinking
Insight
Bender: Building general AI is not sound engineering practice
“So the ability to be general and here I'm thinking of the work of Dr. Tamik Gibru is not an engineering practice. That's an unscoped system. So what Dr. Gibru says is the first step in engineering is your specifications. What is it that you're building? If wha…”
Emily M. Bender May 14, 2025 ▶ 20:27 AI’s Drawbacks: Environmental Damage, Bad Benchmarks, Outsourcing Thinking
Insight
Bender: AI Bots Cannot Have Judgment or Accountability
“A bot is not the kind of thing that can have judgment, nor is it the kind of thing that can have accountability for exercising judgment.”
Emily M. Bender May 14, 2025 ▶ 34:08 AI’s Drawbacks: Environmental Damage, Bad Benchmarks, Outsourcing Thinking
Insight
Bender argues clinical note-taking is essential medical thinking, not clerical work
“Writing the clinical note is actually part of the process of care. It is the doctor reflecting on what came out of that conversation with the patient and thinking it through, writing it down, plans for next treatment. That is not something that I want doctors …”
Emily M. Bender May 14, 2025 ▶ 39:40 AI’s Drawbacks: Environmental Damage, Bad Benchmarks, Outsourcing Thinking
Insight
Bender: AI coding assistants accumulate undocumented technical debt
“As coding assessments, assistants, so that's sort of a machine translation problem between natural language and some programming language and there I really worry about technical debt where you have, you know, output code that was not written by a person that'…”
Emily M. Bender May 14, 2025 ▶ 53:29 AI’s Drawbacks: Environmental Damage, Bad Benchmarks, Outsourcing Thinking
Assertion Supported
Bender: Speech-to-text systems perform unequally across language varieties
“Thirdly, you've got the fact that automatic transcription systems, which are the first step in this, do not work equally well for different language varieties.”
Emily M. Bender May 14, 2025 ▶ 40:12 AI’s Drawbacks: Environmental Damage, Bad Benchmarks, Outsourcing Thinking

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
AI’s Drawbacks: Environmental Damage, Bad Benchmarks, Outsourcing Thinking May 14, 2025 16m
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