Emily M. Bender

A question for scientists (construed as broadly as you like) of BlueSky: What makes something data?

(Question inspired by a talk I listened to this morning, and of course I have thoughts, but I wanted to throw this out there first.)

A question for scientists (construed as broadly as you like) of BlueSky: What makes something data?

(Question inspired by a talk I listened to this morning, and of course I have thoughts, but I wanted to throw this out there first.)

The video from our Unlearning Cisnormativity panel has just been posted:

www.mozillafestival.org/en/2025-high...

Whenever this is mentioned, it is obligatory to post xkcd 2381, in which @gretchenmcc.bsky.social shares forbidden linguistic knowledge with the masses.

I wrote a bit about my first MozFest, moments of rupture, narratives we don't control, and trans justice

buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

Office Hours: Faculty on the Implications of Generative AI for Higher Education - The Phoenix Swarthmore professors share their thoughts on the growing prevalence of generative artificial intelligence and its implications for higher education and the liberal arts.

Got a mini-op-ed published in the campus newspaper today, in case you're wondering how I feel about generative AI. (With the compulsory shout-out to @emilymbender.bsky.social, of course)

swarthmorephoenix.com/2025/11/20/o...

Opinion Forum | How AI Is Changing Higher Education The technology is reshaping every aspect of university life. Fifteen scholars weigh in on what happens next.

Plese don't skip the link:
www.chronicle.com/article/how-...

I mean, I won't argue with that -- but what does it have to do with my post? Did you QT the wrong thing?

Hey linguists, check it out! @lingsocam.bsky.social has virtual registration options for the #LSA2026 meeting:

web.cvent.com/event/d45318...

🐦🐦

Starting to feel very sympathetic to Sisyphus.

Screenshot of opening paras of my piece: Chatbots Are Antithetical to Learning By Emily M. Bender Across higher education, administrators, faculty, staff, and students are being inundated with claims that large language models (often marketed as “AI”) represent the future of both education and the workplace. They tell us that prompt engineering and so on are essential skills that students must master to be competitive, and that all of this tech will bring us unparalleled efficiency gains, allowing us to focus on “what really matters.” The reason for this messaging isn’t any actual scientific breakthrough but rather the desperation of tech companies to try to recoup their massive investment in so-called AI. Unfortunately, these calls are also frequently coming from inside the house, with university administrators and some faculty jumping on the bandwagon and singing the companies’ advertising jingles for them. But synthetic text-extruding machines are in fact antithetical to the mission of education. Writing is thinking and learning. Pushing a button to generate an essay-shaped object requires little thinking and accomplishes minimal learning. Sharing synthetic text with an instructor means missing out on genuine feedback and help with honing both arguments and authorial voice. When teachers value the polished but anodyne text extruded from these systems over students’ authentic voices, we reinforce harmful linguistic ideologies, including those that associate stigmatized varieties of language with lack of “intelligence.”

A little belatedly sharing this piece that I published in @chronicle.com 's Opinion Forum (sorry full text is paywalled)

www.chronicle.com/article/how-...

It’s time for another “all hell” episode! @alexhanna.bsky.social and I tried to clear the backlog, but it’s just coming in too fast. Listen in as we struggle through:

www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/epis...

Thanks to Ozzy Llinas Goodman for production!

Screenshot of opening paras of my piece: Chatbots Are Antithetical to Learning By Emily M. Bender Across higher education, administrators, faculty, staff, and students are being inundated with claims that large language models (often marketed as “AI”) represent the future of both education and the workplace. They tell us that prompt engineering and so on are essential skills that students must master to be competitive, and that all of this tech will bring us unparalleled efficiency gains, allowing us to focus on “what really matters.” The reason for this messaging isn’t any actual scientific breakthrough but rather the desperation of tech companies to try to recoup their massive investment in so-called AI. Unfortunately, these calls are also frequently coming from inside the house, with university administrators and some faculty jumping on the bandwagon and singing the companies’ advertising jingles for them. But synthetic text-extruding machines are in fact antithetical to the mission of education. Writing is thinking and learning. Pushing a button to generate an essay-shaped object requires little thinking and accomplishes minimal learning. Sharing synthetic text with an instructor means missing out on genuine feedback and help with honing both arguments and authorial voice. When teachers value the polished but anodyne text extruded from these systems over students’ authentic voices, we reinforce harmful linguistic ideologies, including those that associate stigmatized varieties of language with lack of “intelligence.”

A little belatedly sharing this piece that I published in @chronicle.com 's Opinion Forum (sorry full text is paywalled)

www.chronicle.com/article/how-...

And hey @lingsocam.bsky.social -- why aren't you posting about this on your own socials?

This is particularly helpful for those of us on the quarter system for whom the conference usually ends at the end of the first week of classes -- a time when traveling across the country is usually difficult.

Hey linguists, check it out! @lingsocam.bsky.social has virtual registration options for the #LSA2026 meeting:

web.cvent.com/event/d45318...

🐦🐦

Oh ugh -- rather than e.g. paying for care givers to take the load off, they're making a prize for whomever can spin the best magic bean story.

LLMs destroy context. You used to be able to tell a crank website from a good source partly by its style.

But now we have a tool that puts careful research, incoherent garbage, and intentional shitposting through a kind of grammatical instagram filter, presenting them all with the same credibility

Also available as video on PeerTube:
peertube.dair-institute.org/w/cAQeEySzC3...

It's like, you could do that pretend with your kid, just like as a parent and child together. The message that we aren’t good enough with our imagination, I think, is one of the insidious things here.

Alex: Yeah.

Captions for audiogram continued:

Just, so here: “I literally just said something like, I’m going to do a voice call with my son and I want you to pretend that you’re an astronaut on the ISS.”

>>

It’s time for another “all hell” episode! @alexhanna.bsky.social and I tried to clear the backlog, but it’s just coming in too fast. Listen in as we struggle through:

www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/epis...

Thanks to Ozzy Llinas Goodman for production!

Hey historians 🗃️: Do you know of presses that publish short books (around 30K words / 90 pages plus notes)? I have been working on an article project that could easily turn into an great micro-history of that length, but I'm not sure it would make it to the usual full 60-90K words...

Got it -- will email you.

AI Hype Is Steering EU Policy Off Course | TechPolicy.Press Kris Shrishak and Abeba Birhane say policymakers should stop peddling in unscientific discourse about "AGI" and "superintelligence."

We need our policymakers everywhere to be attuned to the needs of the people, not the whims of CEOs -- and especially not CEOs in the grip of TESCREAList fantasies.

Thank you @abeba.bsky.social and @krisshrishak.bsky.social for speaking up

www.techpolicy.press/ai-hype-is-s...

And yet, my Seattle pride also compels me to say that I live further North than most Canadians.

Reporting in from 47.6061° N to say that this is absolutely the right advice.

(I say the same to all new students at orientation in September as part of the long-dark survival kit. My Danish friends think its v cute of us.)

Thank you!

No holds barred from @emilymbender.bsky.social and @alexhanna.bsky.social that punctures much of the AI hype, showing just how much it is infected by bias, repugnant ethics and self-dealing, with all-too-tangible harms being trivialised. A timely read 💙📚

Some thoughts on why OpenAI et Al should be held accountable for all of the slop that comes out of their systems.