The AI Con: Emily M. Bender in Conversation with Shelley Fairweather-Vega

Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum is delighted to welcome two Seattle authors at the intersection of language and technology for a timely conversation on the hype and realities of Artificial Intelligence.

Dr. Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington and co-author of The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, a practical guide to seeing through AI hype, questioning who benefits from it, and imagining a better path forward. Shelley Fairweather-Vega is the English-language translator of Hamid Ismailov’s We Computers, a novel in which a French poet builds a computer program capable of analyzing and generating literature, a story that uncannily anticipates our current moment.

Together, they explore the difference between pattern recognition and meaning, “ghosts” in the machine, and what literature, including a novel written decades ago, can teach us about the seduction of alleged artificial intelligence.