We are pleased to announce the Spring Lecture for our AI initiative which will take place on Friday March 22 at 12:00 noon in Engineering Science Building 048 (basement of the Wond’ry), and will include a box lunch for those who sign up. The speaker will be Emily Bender, who is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington, and an honoree in the 2023 Time100-AI list of the most influential people in AI. Prof. Bender has published numerous papers on the risks of large language models and on ethics in natural language processing. Among these, the most widely disseminated one, co-authored with Timnit Gebru and others, was titled “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: can Language Models Be Too Big?”
Here is a description of her talk:
ChatGP-Why:
When, if ever, is synthetic text safe, appropriate, and desirable?
Ever since OpenAI released ChatGPT, the internet has been awash in synthetic text, with suggested applications including robo-lawyers, robo-therapists, and robo-journalists. All of these applications present unacceptable risks because ChatGPT and all other language models are nothing more than ungrounded text synthesis machines. I will overview how language models work and why they can seem to be using language meaningfully – despite only modeling the distribution of word forms. This leads into a discussion of the risks we identified in the Stochastic Parrots paper (Bender, Gebru et al 2021) and how they are playing out in the era of ChatGPT. Finally, I will explore what must hold for an appropriate use case for text synthesis.
If you would like to attend and receive a box lunch from Panera, please use the link provided Here to fill out a short form. The form will serve as RSVP, so please do fill one out even if lunch is not desired. Collection of forms will conclude on 3/19.
Directions to Room: The Engineering Science Building (ESB) and Wond’ry are located at 2414 Highland Ave., just across from the VA Hospital. To get to ESB Room 048, take the big spiral staircase in the ground floor lobby of the Wond’ry down to the basement level, then make a sharp right to enter Room 048.
We hope to see you there! Please feel free to disseminate this invitation to any colleagues or students who might be interested in it.
Michael Bess and Ole Molvig