UW-Madison’s Language Institute and Data Science Institute are hosting a public lecture with Emily Bender, University of Washington, on September 14, 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. The lecture will be held at the Discovery Building’s DeLuca Forum.

Since OpenAI released ChatGPT, the internet has been awash in synthetic text, with suggested applications including robo-lawyers, robo-therapists and robo-journalists. Bender posits that these applications present unacceptable risks because ChatGPT and all other language models are nothing more than ungrounded text synthesis machines. In this lecture, Bender will provide an overview of how language models work, discuss risks associated with them, and explore what must hold for an appropriate use case for text synthesis.

The lecture will be followed by a reception from 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. hosted by the Data Science Institute in the Discovery Building Atrium. For event details, visit go.wisc.edu/emily-bender.