Steven Bird 🍉

Reading the AI ethics literature feels like doomscrolling the most outrageous newsfeed. It flips from the sanguine to the alarming, from infuriating algorithmic solutionism to disturbing insights, trapping attention for days on end. Has anyone talked about the harms of exploring AI harms? 😵‍💫

26.11.2025 10:01 — 👍 3    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Dan McQuillan?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDOU...

21.11.2025 07:07 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

ACL terminology:
"Paper" = anything with lots of tables with numbers.
"Position paper" = anything critical or just deeper.

I propose:
"Paper" = intellectual contribution.
"Engineering paper" = anything purely technocratic.

19.03.2025 06:17 — 👍 7    🔁 1    💬 0    📌 0

bird-lt4all-we-dont-trust-those-mobiles.mp4

We Don't Trust Those Mobiles: critical reflections on generative AI for minoritised languages and new ways forward. Presentation delivered at LT4All (Paris, February 2025) #IndigenousLanguages #firstvoices #NLP #ethics
bit.ly/bird-lt4all-...

19.03.2025 00:57 — 👍 3    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Thanks Will! It appeared in the ACL'24 proceedings. This post of mine was a repost from X/Twitter 6 months ago.

04.02.2025 12:28 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

That's really interesting how you could normalise the disfluencies to get to something more readily translatable, and that this simulates what humans seem to be doing subconsciously.

04.02.2025 12:25 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

For more of this story, please watch the 10 minute intro video, or dive into my ACL'24 paper "Must NLP be Extractive?" What do you think? Please let me know in the comments. 5/5
bit.ly/bird-must-nl... aclanthology.org/2024.acl-lon...

29.01.2025 22:49 — 👍 3    🔁 1    💬 2    📌 1

A table listing epistemologies, axiologies, teleologies, ideologies, etc of different paradigms of NLP

There are other ways of thinking about what language *is*. Our epistemology of language affects how we approach language technologies. The first wave and second waves of symbolic and subsymbolic NLP are familiar. I believe a third wave is emerging: Relational Language Processing. 4/5

29.01.2025 22:49 — 👍 3    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

When we do this, something interesting comes up: relationality. Language is intrinsically social, inseparable from culture, society, or nature. Language both reflects and creates context. This exceeds narrow epistemologies of "language as lexicogrammatical code", or "language as sequence data". 3/5

29.01.2025 22:49 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

I find it instructive to look at Indigenous societies, who are guarding their agency in the face of relentless pressures from outside, enacting their sovereignty in shaping their lives, landscapes, and languages. We who increasingly cede our agency to AI may have something to learn. 2/5

29.01.2025 22:49 — 👍 3    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Generative AI extracts behavioural data and takes over human agency. Augmentative Intelligence carefully enhances human agency. What would it be like to take this other fork, and seek a path towards a non-extractive NLP committed to augmentative solutions? 🧵(updated from Twitter/X Aug'24) 1/5

29.01.2025 22:49 — 👍 3    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Language Technology and the Metacrisis, my keynote presentation at ALTA'24, the Australasian Language Technology Workshop: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcU_...

27.01.2025 06:22 — 👍 4    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0