AI’s Drawbacks: Environmental Damage, Bad Benchmarks, Outsourcing Thinking — With Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna
Emily Bender is a computational linguistics professor at the University of Washington. Alex Hanna is the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. Bender and Hanna join Big Technology to discuss what their new book, “The AI‑Con," which they describe as the layered ways today’s language‑model boom obscures environmental costs, labor harms, and shaky science. Tune in to hear a lively back‑and‑forth on whether chatbots are useful tools or polished parlor tricks. We also cover benchmark gaming, data‑center water use, doomerism, and more. Hit play for a candid debate that will leave you smarter about where generative AI really stands — and what comes next.
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Pushing Back on AI Hype with Alex Hanna - #649
Today we’re joined by Alex Hanna, the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). In our conversation with Alex, we discuss the topic of AI hype and the importance of tackling the issues and impacts it has on society. Alex highlights how the hype cycle started, concerning use cases, incentives driving people towards the rapid commercialization of AI tools, and the need for robust evaluation tools and frameworks to assess and mitigate the risks of these technologies. We also talked about DAIR and how they’ve crafted their research agenda. We discuss current research projects like DAIR Fellow Asmelash Teka Hadgu’s research supporting machine translation and speech recognition tools for the low-resource Amharic and Tigrinya languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, in partnership with his startup Lesan.AI. We also explore the “Do Data Sets Have Politics” paper, which focuses on coding various variables and conducting a qualitative analysis of computer vision data sets to uncover the inherent politics present in data sets and the challenges in data set creation.
The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/649.