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Bender: ChatGPT only mimics language form and fails genuine information needs

Emily M. Bender · AI’s Drawbacks: Environmental Damage, Bad Benchmarks, Outsourcing Thinking · May 14, 2025 · at 24:10

Emily M. Bender, computational linguistics professor and co-author of 'The AI Con', critiques the use of large language models like ChatGPT for search and information retrieval on the Big Technology Podcast.

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“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 extremely bad idea to use it if you actually have an information need.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Emily M. Bender

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
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“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
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