@emilymbender@dair-community.social
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

emilymbender

@emilymbender@dair-community.social

Professor, Linguistics, University of Washington

Faculty Director, Professional MS Program in Computational Linguistics (CLMS)

If we don't know each other, I probably won't reply to your DM. For more, see my contacting me page: http://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/contact/

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

"a potential gold mine for criminal hackers or domestic abusers who may physically access their victim’s device. Images include captures of messages sent on encrypted messaging apps Signal and WhatsApp, and remain in the captures regardless of whether disappearing messages are turned on in the apps."

In 2024 it still somehow isn't standard practice to ask in the design process: Are we building the killer app for domestic abusers?

https://www.wired.com/story/total-recall-windows-recall-ai/

emilymbender,
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

@sarae I'm so sorry.

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

TODAY!!

Heard the news about Sen Schumer's AI report and wondered what Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 made of it?

Join @alex and me on Monday June 3, noon Pacific to find out!

https://www.twitch.tv/dair_institute

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

This is a decent summary of the octopus thought experiment from Bender & Koller 2020, with two glaring exceptions, right at the start:

  1. We were NOT talking about "AI". That's a paper about language models, and even though other people are (now) talking about LLMs as if they were AI, we weren't and never would.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/01/wtf-is-ai/

>>

emilymbender,
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar
  1. The octopus is posited to be hyperintelligent precisely because we wanted to show that no entity could learn to "understand" language based on form alone; it's doesn't matter what's inside the box.

So it's extra grating to read that we "likened AI to “a hyper-intelligent deep-sea octopus.”

>>

emilymbender,
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

Here's my answer to the question WTF is AI?

https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/opening-remarks-on-ai-in-the-workplace-new-crisis-or-longstanding-challenge-eb81d1bee9f

emilymbender,
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

@rsf92 Hm, if only your curiosity were strong enough to go look up the open access paper the octopus thought experiment is detailed in....

Screencap from Bender & Koller 2020: Our purpose here is to look more deeply into why meaning can’t be learned from linguistic form alone, even in the context of modern hardware and techniques for scaling connectionist models to the point where they can take in vast amounts of data. We argue that, independently of whether passing the Turing test would mean a system is intelligent, a system that is trained only on form would fail a sufficiently sensitive test, because it lacks the ability to connect its utterances to the world.

emilymbender,
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

I'm happy to report that the author has updated the piece so that it presents our work more accurately!

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

Heard the news about Sen Schumer's AI report and wondered what Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 made of it?

Join @alex and me on Monday June 3, noon Pacific to find out!

https://www.twitch.tv/dair_institute

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

/ trying to find citations:

Does anyone know of studies looking at how peer review (in any field/across fields) favors or disfavors work that uses "AI" methods?

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

Heard the news about Sen Schumer's AI report and wondered what Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 made of it?

Join @alex and me on Monday June 3, noon Pacific to find out!

https://www.twitch.tv/dair_institute

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

A shout out to librarians, libraries and library science -- and the practices of care, community and service which make up their democratizing force.

https://buttondown.email/maiht3k/archive/information-access-as-a-public-good/

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

We've all been laughing at the obvious fails from Google's AI Overviews feature, but there's a serious lesson in there too about how it disrupts the relational nature of information. More in the latest Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 newsletter:

https://buttondown.email/maiht3k/archive/information-is-relational/

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 Episode 32: A Flood of AI Hell, in which @alex and I manage to stay afloat through it all thanks to an amazing sea shanty that she wrote for the occasion. Ridicule as praxis!

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/15120816-episode-32-a-flood-of-ai-hell-april-29-2024

Also available as video on PeerTube!
https://peertube.dair-institute.org/w/kwJH8zfnLR4uowPQCigMCe

With thanks, as always, to Christie Taylor for production!

Neverfadingwood, (edited ) to random
@Neverfadingwood@lingo.lol avatar

Last week, there was a story from AFP about AI "deceiving" people. Just now I've listened to an excellent podcast co-hosted by Prof. @emilymbender looking at the peer-reviewed academic paper that was the basis for this story. It is very insightful, and an excellent remedy to the AI hype.
EDIT: It's the May 20 episode.
https://www.twitch.tv/dair_institute

emilymbender,
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

@Neverfadingwood @elmerot That was episode 33! So far, it's only in the intro, but once the episode is published it'll be part of the title.

You can find all back episodes here, once published:

https://www.dair-institute.org/maiht3k/

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

Here's a great reply to Sen Schumer's industry-centric, "innovation"-focused AI report from last week. For policymakers interested in people-centric, evidence-based policymaking, and those who would hold them to it, it's a great overview of the evidence:

https://senateshadowreport.com/

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

Hey folks, let's have a little chat about construct validity --- this is the concept that if you're going to use a psychological test, there should be good reason to believe that a) the thing it's meant to be testing is real and b) results on the test reflect something about that thing.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/theory-of-mind-ai

>>

emilymbender,
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

So, even if a test has been established to have construct validity as a test relating to human cognition, you can't just throw it at a chatbot and take the results as meaningful.

What would it mean for a language model to have a theory of mind? How does string manipulation relate to that? Without answers to these questions, the tests are meaningless.

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

Colleague in globally dispersed organization asks for meeting, says it's time sensitive, wants 8am my time Monday. I arrange my day so I can be ready at that time. Colleague does not show up. Grrr.

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

Join us today!

On the next Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, guest host @mmitchell_ai and I will look into claims that "AI has learned to deceive humans". Join us live at noon Pacific, May 20, 2024:

twitch.tv/dair_institute

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

This is tomorrow!

On the next Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, guest host @mmitchell_ai and I will look into claims that "AI has learned to deceive humans". Join us live at noon Pacific, May 20, 2024:

twitch.tv/dair_institute

emilymbender,
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

@kaveinthran You can find all of our episodes here!

https://www.dair-institute.org/maiht3k/

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

This paper and its predecessor that Chirag Shah and I wrote started off as a reaction to Google's plans to shove "GenAI" into search. It was clear that that was a bad idea as early as 2021 (when we started writing the first paper) and it's even clearer now.

https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/112005034372139457

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

The folks at FTC Office of Technology are doing excellent work taking in research and using it to make a practical difference. See link for a range of topics they are interested in -- for anyone working in these areas, this is a great way to have impact!

https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/2024/05/p-np-not-exactly-here-are-some-research-questions-office-technology

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

On the next Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, guest host @mmitchell_ai and I will look into claims that "AI has learned to deceive humans". Join us live at noon Pacific, May 20, 2024:

twitch.tv/dair_institute

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