How to fight AI hype and create the future we want
Please register to attend
Join Professor Catherine Pope for a talk & 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.
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
Emily M Bender is the Howard and Frances Nostrand Endowed Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington, and is the 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.
Date:
15 July 2025, 18:30
Venue:
Blavatnik School of Government, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter OX2 6GG
Venue Details:
Tun Razak lecture theatre - in-person event only
Speaker:
Dr Emily M Bender (University of Washington)
Organising department:
Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences
Organiser:
Professor Catherine Pope (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
catherine.pope@phc.ox.ac.uk
Host:
Professor Catherine Pope (University of Oxford)
Booking required?:
Required
Booking url:
https://www.phc.ox.ac.uk/events/how-to-fight-ai-hype-and-create-the-future-we-want
Booking email:
elizabeth.woolliams@phc.ox.ac.uk
Cost:
FOC
Audience:
Public
Editor:
Elizabeth Woolliams
