Emily M. Bender is one of the most prominent critical voices against the uncritical adoption of “AI”-branded language technology. What makes her voice particularly insightful is her domain expertise as a computational linguist and her technical understanding of how languages models work — and how significantly they differ from the way that humans acquire and process language.
This week, Professor Bender is visiting Aarhus University and will give a talk titled “Resisting Dehumanization in the Age of ‘AI’, the View from the Humanities”. Her argument is that the production and promotion of so-called “AI” technology involves dehumanization on many fronts: The computational metaphor valorizes one kind of cognitive activity as “intelligence”, devaluing many other aspects of human experience, while also focusing on agents as isolated individuals rather than seeing the importance of being located within webs of relationships and belonging to communities. AI research paradigms frequently frame the purpose of humans to be labelers of data or interchangeable machine components. Meanwhile, data collected from and about people is understood as “ground truth” even while it lies about those people, especially marginalized people. She believes that the humanities have a key role to play in resisting these trends by painting a deeper and richer picture of what it is to be human and keeping the focus there.
These arguments are elaborated in more detail in her 2025 book “The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want”, co-authored with sociologist of technology, Alex Hanna.
Stay tuned for an upcoming post about Bender’s views on the value of training in linguistics in the AI era.*
For those interested, Bender’s talk takes place this Thursday,
May 28th 2026, 10:00-11:00 in 1483-444, in Nobelparken,
Jens Chr. Skousvej 2, 8000 Aarhus.
Rebekah Baglini is a computational linguist based at Aarhus University.
Kirsi Tilk is a sound engineer, podcaster, broadcaster and musician.
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