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Emily M. Bender

Emily M. Bender

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May 12

Stochastic Parrots 🦜: Frequently Unasked Questions

It’s been a bit over five years since the Stochastic Parrots paper (Bender, Gebru et al 2021) was published (and somewhat longer since…

Emily M. Bender

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Dec 7, 2025

LLMs and the information ecosystem: The view from 2019

I’ve found myself wanting to refer to this tweet thread a few times lately and thought it might be worth preserving it somewhere off…

Tweet from @emilymbender at 8:31pm Pacific Time on April 18, 2019. The remaining images in this post are all tweets from the same thread and will contain only the text of the tweet in the alt text. Text of this tweet: I’ve seen several different #NLProc folks suggesting today that it would fun/interesting/worthwhile to use BERT or GPT-2 to fill in the redacted bits of the Mueller report. A short thread on why this is a terrible idea /1

Emily M. Bender

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Nov 29, 2025

What makes something data?

This is a question I posted on BlueSky on Friday 11/21/25, inspired by a talk I recently attended about evaluation of “AI” systems. I think…

Two pine cones laidout over slate tiles in relatively bright sunlight. Between the pine cones is a yellow measuring tape showing feet and inches. The pine cones are approximately lined up to each have their base at one end of the ruler. The tip of the upper pine cone is at approximately 8 inches; the lower one at approximately 13.5 inches.

Emily M. Bender

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Feb 15, 2024

Advocating for Protections for the Information Ecosystem

Today, I got to participate in a round table organized by Congressman Ro Khanna about how AI will impact the workforce, elections…

Globby brown oil floating in turquoise blue water. Image source: https://www.rawpixel.com/image/8732347/photo-image-public-domain-blue-pattern

Emily M. Bender

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Oct 1, 2023

Opening remarks on “AI in the Workplace: New Crisis or Longstanding Challenge”

On Thursday 9/28, I had the opportunity to speak at a virtual roundtable convened by Congressman Bobby Scott on “AI in the Workplace: New…

Drawing of a manequin behind a chess board. Below the chessboard is a cabinet with its doors and drawers open and some gears visible.

Emily M. Bender

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Sep 6, 2023

Scholarship should be open, inclusive and slow

This tweet of mine from a few days ago has been getting a lot of negative attention this week, I think because of some hostile QTs, and…

Photo of redwood trees and a lush forest understory. There is fog between the tree trunks.

Emily M. Bender

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Aug 6, 2023

Cleaning up a baby peacock sullied by a non-information spill

Last week, I wrote:

Screencap of Google image search results for the search “baby peacock”, containing a grid of 14 images, all apparently photographs, all of baby birds, some brown and some with the vivid colors associated with peacocks.

Emily M. Bender

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Jul 29, 2023

“Ensuring Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy AI”: What those seven companies avoided committing to

On July 21, 2023, in a photo op featuring only men in suits, President Biden announced that seven companies (Amazon, Anthropic, Google…

Photo of the White House from the North on a sunny day. There is a fountain surrounded by red flowers in the foreground.

Emily M. Bender

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Jul 5, 2023

Talking about a ‘schism’ is ahistorical

In two recent conversations with very thoughtful journalists, I was asked about the apparent ‘schism’ between those making a lot of noise…

Photo of the split apple rock off the coast of ateroa/New Zealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_Apple_Rock The rock is large, round and grey and split in two. It is surrounded by blue water. The background has white clouds low but clear sky up above. There is a bird sittingon the right hand half of the rock.

Emily M. Bender

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Jun 22, 2023

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000

Mystery AI Hype Theater is now available in podcast form! https://buzzsprout.com/2126417

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000

Emily M. Bender

Emily M. Bender

Professor, Linguistics, University of Washington// Faculty Director, Professional MS Program in Computational Linguistics (CLMS) faculty.washington.edu/ebender

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