Clarion West presents a conversation with Ted Chiang and Dr. Emily M. Bender on Friday, November 10 at 7:30 PM at Town Hall Seattle. Purchase tickets here.

UW Professor of Linguistics Emily M. Bender talks with award-winning science fiction author Ted Chiang about the hype, realistic expectations, and who should be involved in the conversation around AI. Moderated by Jeopardy! champion and Phinney Books owner Tom Nissley.

Both speakers were recently featured in Time Magazine’s Time100 Most Influential People in AI. “This group of 100 individuals is in many ways a map of the relationships and power centers driving the development of AI. They are rivals and regulators, scientists and artists, advocates and executives—the competing and cooperating humans whose insights, desires, and flaws will shape the direction of an increasingly influential technology,” wrote Time’s Sam Jacobs on how they selected the scientists, thinkers, journalists, innovators, and artists featured in the article.

The article declares Ted Chiang as “one of the sharpest critics of AI and the corporations behind it.” In clear sentimental agreement, Dr. Bender is quoted in the article stating, “You can’t expect a machine-learning system to learn stuff that’s not in its training data. Otherwise you’re expecting magic.” On November 10, hear both speakers discuss their thoughts and concerns in-person at Town Hall Seattle or live in Zoom.

This event is a fundraiser for Clarion West, supporting emerging and underrepresented writers in speculative fiction.

About Dr. Emily M. Bender: Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Linguistics and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Computer Science and the Information School at the University of Washington, where she has been on the faculty since 2003. Her research interests include multilingual grammar engineering, computational semantics, and the societal impacts of language technology.  She is the co-author of recent influential papers such as Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data (ACL 2020), On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? (FAccT 2021), and AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark (NeurIPS 2021). In 2022 she was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Together with Dr. Alex Hanna, she posts Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, a podcast which skewers AI hype.

About Ted Chiang: Ted Chiang’s fiction has won four Hugo, four Nebula, and six Locus Awards, and has been reprinted in Best American Short Stories. His first collection Stories of Your Life and Others has been translated into twenty-one languages, and the title story was the basis for the Oscar-nominated film Arrival. His second collection Exhalation was chosen by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2019.

About Tom Nissley: Tom Nissley is the owner of Phinney Books and Madison Books in Seattle. He’s the author of A Reader’s Book of Days, has a PhD in English from the University of Washington, and was an eight-time champion on Jeopardy!

[Based on a press release.]