creators

Emily M. Bender - linguist behind Stochastic Parrots

Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, co-wrote Stochastic Parrots and The AI Con and co-hosts Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000.

Emily M. Bender is a computational linguist and professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington, where she has taught since 2003. Her faculty page lists her as the Thomas L. and Margo G. Wyckoff Endowed Professor, faculty director of the professional master's in computational linguistics, director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory, and adjunct professor in computer science and engineering and in the Information School. She held the Howard and Frances Nostrand professorship from 2019 to 2022, and took her PhD at Stanford in 2000. She is best known for "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?", written with Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major and Margaret Mitchell, who published under the name Shmargaret Shmitchell, and presented at FAccT 2021. It set out the environmental, financial and social costs of ever-larger language models. Her earlier paper with Alexander Koller, "Climbing towards NLU", argued that form alone gives a system no access to meaning. In May 2025 she published "The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want" with Alex Hanna, with whom she also makes the podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000. She served on the Association for Computational Linguistics executive board from 2022 to 2025, was its president in 2024, and was elected a fellow of the AAAS in 2022.

Specialization

computational linguistics, natural language processing, AI ethics, grammar engineering

Country

United States