How to fight AI hype and create the future we want
Emily M Bender
Tuesday, 15 July 2025, 6.30pm to 7.30pm
Tun Razak lecture theatre, Blavatnik School of Government, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Oxford OX2 6GG
Hosted by Professor Catherine Pope
Sorry, this event is now full. Join Professor Catherine Pope for an evening discussion with Dr Emily M Bender, co-author of "The AI Con", exploring the hype surrounding artificial intelligence. Dr Bender will discuss how AI technologies can devalue human creativity and replace meaningful work, particularly relevant as UK policy drives the shift to digital health and care services.
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Emily M Bender
How to fight AI hype and create the future we want
Tun Razak lecture theatre, Blavatnik School of Government
Emily M Bender is co-author with Alex Hanna of “The AI Con” (2025 Penguin Random House) - described as “a smart, incisive look at the technologies sold as artificial intelligence”.
In this invited lecture, Dr Bender shines a spotlight on the hype surrounding AI. In conversation with Professor Catherine Pope (Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences) and our audience she will discuss how this technology helps the rich get richer by justifying data theft, motivating surveillance capitalism, and devaluing human creativity in order to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines. For those of us working in health and care research these issues and critiques are increasingly important, as UK policy drives the shift from analogue to digital care and services. If you want to know more about the hype and why we are being sold “plagiarism machines”, “synthetic text extruders” “stochastic parrots” and “mathy maths” book now on this link (link now closed)
Emily M Bender is the Howard and Frances Nostrand Endowed Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington, and is Thomas L. and Margo G. Wyckoff Endowed Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington. She directs the Master of Science in Computational Linguistics programme and the Computational Linguistics Laboratory and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Trained in linguistics at Stanford University, and UC Berkeley, she studies multilingual grammar engineering, technology for endangered language documentation, computational semantics, and methodologies for supporting consideration of impacts language technology in NLP research, development, and education.