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“We call on the field to recognize that applications that aim to believably mimic humans bring risk of extreme harms,” she co-wrote in 2021. “Work on synthetic human behavior is a bright line in ethical Al development, where downstream effects need to be understood and modeled in order to block foreseeable harm to society and different social groups.”

chatbots that we easily confuse with humans are not just cute or unnerving. They sit on a bright line. Obscuring that line and blurring — bullshitting — what’s human and what’s not has the power to unravel society

She began learning from, then amplifying, Black women’s voices critiquing AI, including those of Joy Buolamwini (she founded the Algorithmic Justice League while at MIT) and Meredith Broussard (the author of Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World). She also started publicly challenging the term artificial intelligence, a sure way, as a middle-aged woman in a male field, to get yourself branded as a scold. The idea of intelligence has a white-supremacist history. And besides, “intelligent” according to what definition? The three-stratum definition? Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences? The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale? Bender remains particularly fond of an alternative name for AI proposed by a former member of the Italian Parliament: “Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences.” Then people would be out here asking, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”

Tech-makers assuming their reality accurately represents the world create many different kinds of problems. The training data for ChatGPT is believed to include most or all of Wikipedia, pages linked from Reddit, a billion words grabbed off the internet. (It can’t include, say, e-book copies of everything in the Stanford library, as books are protected by copyright law.) The humans who wrote all those words online overrepresent white people. They overrepresent men. They overrepresent wealth. What’s more, we all know what’s out there on the internet: vast swamps of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, neo-Nazism.

One fired Google employee told me succeeding in tech depends on “keeping your mouth shut to everything that’s disturbing.” Otherwise, you’re a problem. “Almost every senior woman in computer science has that rep. Now when I hear, ‘Oh, she’s a problem,’ I’m like, Oh, so you’re saying she’s a senior woman?”

“We haven’t learned to stop imagining the mind behind it.”

In March 2021, Bender published “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” with three co-authors. After the paper came out, two of the co-authors, both women, lost their jobs as co-leads of Google’s Ethical AI team.

“On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” is not a write-up of original research. It’s a synthesis of LLM critiques that Bender and others have made: of the biases encoded in the models; the near impossibility of studying what’s in the training data, given the fact they can contain billions of words; the costs to the climate; the problems with building technology that freezes language in time and thus locks in the problems of the past. Google initially approved the paper, a requirement for publications by staff. Then it rescinded approval and told the Google co-authors to take their names off it. Several did, but Google AI ethicist Timnit Gebru refused. Her colleague (and Bender’s former student) Margaret Mitchell changed her name on the paper to Shmargaret Shmitchell, a move intended, she said, to “index an event and a group of authors who got erased.” Gebru lost her job in December 2020, Mitchell in February 2021. Both women believe this was retaliation and brought their stories to the press. The stochastic-parrot paper went viral, at least by academic standards. The phrase stochastic parrot entered the tech lexicon.

Tech execs loved it. Programmers related to it. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was in many ways the perfect audience: a self-identified hyperrationalist so acculturated to the tech bubble that he seemed to have lost perspective on the world beyond. “I think the nuclear mutually assured destruction rollout was bad for a bunch of reasons,” he said on AngelList Confidential in November. He’s also a believer in the so-called singularity, the tech fantasy that, at some point soon, the distinction between human and machine will collapse. “We are a few years in,” Altman wrote of the cyborg merge in 2017. “It’s probably going to happen sooner than most people think. Hardware is improving at an exponential rate … and the number of smart people working on AI is increasing exponentially as well. Double exponential functions get away from you fast.” On December 4, four days after ChatGPT was released, Altman tweeted, “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.”

“This is one of the moves that turn up ridiculously frequently. People saying, ‘Well, people are just stochastic parrots,’” she said. “People want to believe so badly that these language models are actually intelligent that they’re willing to take themselves as a point of reference and devalue that to match what the language model can do.”

The membrane between academia and industry is permeable almost everywhere; the membrane is practically nonexistent at Stanford, a school so entangled with tech that it can be hard to tell where the university ends and the businesses begin.

“No wonder that men who live day in and day out with machines to which they believe themselves to have become slaves begin to believe that men are machines.”

what’s tenure for, after all?

LLMs are tools made by specific people — people who stand to accumulate huge amounts of money and power, people enamored with the idea of the singularity. The project threatens to blow up what is human in a species sense. But it’s not about humility. It’s not about all of us. It’s not about becoming a humble creation among the world’s others. It’s about some of us — let’s be honest — becoming a superspecies. This is the darkness that awaits when we lose a firm boundary around the idea that humans, all of us, are equally worthy as is.

The AI dream is “governed by the perfectibility thesis, and that’s where we see a fascist form of the human.”

“Why are you trying to trick people into thinking that it really feels sad that you lost your phone?”