Intelligence

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