Department of Linguistics

This week, OpenAI launched what its chief executive, Sam Altman, called “the smartest model in the world”—a generative-AI program whose capabilities are supposedly far greater, and more closely approximate how humans think, than those of any such software preceding it. The start-up has been building toward this moment since September 12, a day that, in OpenAI’s telling, set the world on a new path toward superintelligence. Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the UW, is quoted.

Benchmarks used to rank AI models are several years old, and are often sourced from amateur websites. Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the UW, is quoted.

A new University of Washington study, published in Developmental Science, is the first to compare the amount of music and speech that children hear in infancy. Results showed that infants hear more spoken language than music, with the gap widening as the babies get older. Naja Ferjan Ramírez, assistant professor of linguistics, is a co-author of the study.

Ask Google if cats have been on the moon and it used to spit out a ranked list of websites so you could discover the answer for yourself. Now it comes up with an instant answer generated by artificial intelligence — which may or may not be correct. Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the UW, is quoted and Chirag Shah, professor in the UW Information School, is mentioned.

Large language models convincingly mimic the understanding of mental states. Emily Bender, professor of linguistics at the UW, is quoted.

Artificial intelligence is suddenly everywhere. Fueled by huge technological advances in recent years and gobs of venture capitalist money, AI has become one of the hottest corporate buzzwords. Roughly 1 in 7 public companies mentioned “artificial intelligence” in their annual filings last year, according to a Washington Post analysis. But the term is fuzzy. Emily Bender, professor of linguistics at the UW, is quoted.

Recipes generated by artificial intelligence are increasingly popping up — and following, or trying to follow, them might lead to unexpected results, and not necessarily in a good way. Emily Bender, professor of linguistics at the UW, is quoted.

Recruiters are eager to use generative AI, but a Bloomberg experiment found bias against job candidates based on their names alone. Emily Bender, professor of linguistics at the UW, is quoted.

Seahawks receiver DK Metcalf has been learning American Sign Language and has taken some of this newfound knowledge to the field, signing his celebrations after scoring. What began as a hobby has become a means of self-expression, and as Metcalf has gained attention for signing during games, he has realized it has a great significance to those who use ASL to communicate and the deaf community. The UW's Dan Mathis, assistant teaching professor of linguistics, and Kristi Winter, associate teaching professor of linguistics, are quoted.

Following a dramatic departure of two key leaders from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Microsoft, a major investor in the startup, ended up a winner on Monday. The Redmond-based tech giant said Monday it was hiring former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and co-founder and former OpenAI President Greg Brockman, who left after Altman’s ouster Friday, to lead an in-house AI innovation lab. Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the UW, is quoted.

What do you get when you put two of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people on artificial intelligence together in the same lecture hall? If the two influencers happen to be science-fiction writer Ted Chiang and Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the UW, you get a lot of skepticism about the future of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT.

Artists and writers are up in arms about generative artificial intelligence systems—understandably so. These machine learning models are only capable of pumping out images and text because they’ve been trained on mountains of real people’s creative work, much of it copyrighted. Major AI developers including OpenAI, Meta and Stability AI now face multiple lawsuits on this. Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the UW, is quoted.

Companies are designing AI to appear increasingly human. That can mislead users — or worse. Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the UW, is quoted.

This week, learn why Emily Bender believes “AI” is a bad term, take part in the Dubal Memorial Lecture on ‘Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era’, view the film screening of Tortoise Under the Earth, and more.

Emily M. Bender doesn't consider herself an AI researcher. The professor of linguistics at the UW is, first and foremost, a linguist. But her gimlet-eyed research on the dangers of large language models and her withering cross-examinations of the AI hype cycle have made her one of the industry's most formidable critics.