When people ask me what the phrase "artificial intelligence" means, my short answer is, it means "venture capitalists, give me some money".
But OUP asked me for a longer answer, given here and summarized in the section headings:
Preprint available from my publications page:
@emilymbender I'd love to read the pre-print. I don't know if the link is live (yet), but I tried it now and it gave me a 404. https://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/papers/Bender-AI-2026.pdf was the location the pre-print linked me to.
@gregdosh Thank you -- should be fixed now.
Jul 8, 2026, 4:56 PM@emilymbender This looks great. I am eager to read your preprint, but am getting a 404 for this URL:
https://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/papers/Bender-AI-2026.pdf
@aarbrk Should be fixed now. Please try again.
Jul 8, 2026, 5:03 PM@emilymbender All better! Thanks so much.
@emilymbender Looks great, thank you for sharing the preprint!
Jul 9, 2026, 1:08 AM@emilymbender thank you for making this, and most of your other publications, easily and freely available. I've bookmarked the page for future delving.
@emilymbender Thank you so much for having so much preprints available for free! This really helps to spread the message. 🤗
@emilymbender Hi Emily, (I'm Stephen) thanks for sharing the preprint, very illuminating reading so far. I previously heard about the ELIZA story through a 2016 BBC documentary by Adam Curtis called Hypernormalisation which I thought others in this thread might find interesting or at least entertaining. Here's a clip from it: https://youtu.be/84QouA9Sm4E
@emilymbender Thank you!
@emilymbender Seems to require a subscription to download. Am I looking in the wrong place?
@meltedcheese click the link labeled "preprint" on the entry for that piece on my publications page
@emilymbender I appreciate you making the pre-print available, Dr. Bender!
Jul 13, 2026, 1:23 AM@emilymbender Thanks so much for doing preprints. I'll read the piece with interest.
@emilymbender Looking forward to reading – thank you for sharing! 🙌
Jul 13, 2026, 12:12 PM@emilymbender TY.
Thank you for this paper, @emilymbender !
Side tangent, but a few years ago, friends & I wrote up a timeline of Chinese scifi. The earliest was a ~400 BCE story about a wooden automaton presented to the emperor that was powered by yin/yang principles. He insisted it be dismantled in his presence to prove there wasn't a man inside. People have been fascinated by tech possibilities for a long time! (You obv know that, but you might not know of this particular story.)
@crystalvisits I don't know of that story (nor am I well versed in Chinese scifi). Is your write up available somewhere?
@emilymbender heh. The pandemic started and everything changed and I wasn't in academia then, so it was a poster, and not a poster in the academic sense. 😅😅😅
I can dig up images of it, though! And we did make a bilingual (Chinese/English) version of it. The posters didn't include the context of what the story was about, though -- that's just something I learned from talking with my friends who read it in the original (Classical Chinese) language.
@crystalvisits Sounds very cool!
@emilymbender Thanks! 😅 I felt weirdly worried about replying because you're an actual academic and I'm a part-time masters student talking about a fun project I did years before I dreamed of grad school. Thank you for being encouraging.
Jul 8, 2026, 5:13 PM@emilymbender been looking forward to this thank you for sharing
@emilymbender don't forget: AI is automated bias and discrimination for usual or unusual reasons.
Jul 8, 2026, 5:40 PM@emilymbender@dair-community.social It really is the blockchain of software buzzwords.
@emilymbender I find myself wondering, can we create AI that enhances human labour, that strengthens accountability, that decentralises power? Are @DAIR or anyone else you know working on that? And if so, how can I get involved?
@PeteBleackley @emilymbender @DAIR Yes. Many researchers in #AI approach the topic as “augmented cognition” technology, and in some cases, a teammate or partner. You’ll find examples of that orientation at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (#IHMC). There is/was a project on “Digital Companions” that was oriented towards towards assisting people with progressive dementia, and (with the Veterans Administration) on assisting vets with #TBI traumatic brain injury.
@emilymbender
AI is and always will be the villagers in Age of Empires
Jul 8, 2026, 6:13 PM@emilymbender "Shift accountability" is always the first thing any psychopath notices about science.
@emilymbender A fascinating paper, which I need to read again more slowly to fully appreciate its theses.
How can I respond to your article without appearing to "mansplain"? (FWIW, I've been adjacent to the "AI" R&D field for decades, and have worked on several attempts to product-ize research prototypes, in machine learning, natural languages processing, deductive databases; but I'm far from being an expert in any of these (although I've worked with experts), let alone in something as general as "AI", and my non-expertise will no doubt be indistinguishable from "mansplaining".)
That is, if you wish to have a conversation with a semi-expert.
@emilymbender@dair-community.social Mind sending me a pdf? My university's shib is misbehaving.
@emilymbender what if you run an open source AI locally on your machine? Then it wouldn’t centralise power. Right?
Jul 8, 2026, 10:39 PM
@emilymbender Read your preprint. Great work - I definitely need to go through some of the papers you cited.
(You would really think the word "Contents" would convey to people that the words in the image are not the entirety of what you wrote, but alas)
@emilymbender REAL AI (artificial intelligence) is the ultimate goal of machine learning. What is marketed as AI is Automated Incompetence based upon very smart and valuable language prediction modeling using stolen data. It is rather important to differentiate between the two. Your writing is a excellent description of what is currently being marketed.
@wbpeckham Something tells me you didn't actually read the article.
@emilymbender If it requires clicking on a link, and if I didn't request it, I never do.
@wbpeckham Well then, you are awfully confident in replying to something you didn't read. (And yes, you look like a mansplaining fool.)
@emilymbender And yet, what I did see of your writing I found compelling and worth complimenting. I guess that makes me worth criticizing.
@wbpeckham for this interaction, yes
Professor Bender,
I read your prepublication article with great interest. One thought it stirred for me is that the harms of the “AI” frame may be strengthened by the older “arms race” frame.
I was at Harvey Mudd when Edward Teller visited and argued, somewhat surprisingly, that excessive secrecy had damaged American science. His view was that classified work drove away some of the best researchers, slowed open correction, and still failed to prevent leakage.
That seems relevant to AI now. “Arms race” language does not merely describe policy. It changes who participates, what work becomes respectable, where accountability goes, and which institutions accumulate power.
My own experience across early Internet development, classified systems work, venture-funded technology, and institutional exclusion has made me increasingly suspicious of any technical framing that hides labor, concentrates authority, or prevents open critique.
Your article gave me a sharper vocabulary for that concern.
Terri Gilbert
@emilymbender This is going to be a really good reference to use for a presentation I will make next week for arguments against AI in game development, and this breakdown of the word itself in this paper will be super helpful to get a good footing and to be very specific about wlhat "AI" we are talking about in different contexts.
Thanks a lot for sharing! (Btw, can I refer to this paper and cite you in the presentation for quotes and paraphrasing?)
@glitchypixel yes please do so!
@emilymbender just fyi. I finally did the talk (its in Spanish BTW).
I'm not sure if I did a such a good job, I tried my best. I kinda used your descriptions of AI as a sort to "spine" to the while talk.
It's a bit of a manifesto, more personal and artistic oriented. But at least I hope its not just an aimlessly screed.
I hope I did a good job respecting your work here.
@emilymbender Thanks for sharing, I find it very useful.
Jul 8, 2026, 10:38 PM
@emilymbender Not a good thing in the wrong hands. Which is billions of people.
Jul 9, 2026, 2:08 AM@emilymbender, @scroeser relevant to your current interests. :)
@emilymbender excited to read this, thank you for sharing the preprint!
@emilymbender Thank you for sharing the pre-print. I read it with great interest.
I am curious about "McCarthy et al ... distancing themselves from adjacent work by Norbert Wiener and colleagues that was being carried out under the name cybernetics."
If you have a moment, could you please elaborate a bit or recommend where I could learn more about this rivalry? I didn't know there was a deliberate distinction between AI and cybernetics.
@emilymbender Great explanation!
@emilymbender The table of contents for the particular volume of "Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Society" that this paper is published within are also quite enticing. It reads like banger after banger that's going to destroy my reading list (though Professor Bender's paper rests at the top, of course):
* AI Ethics for Disability Justice
* China’s Social Credit System Project: Origins, Mechanisms, and Controversies
* Colonial Surveillance Mechanisms: Past and Present
* Confronting and Subverting LGBTQIA+ Surveillance
* Critical Logistics
* Data-Driven Management and Governance
* Digital Infrastructures of Democracy
* Digital Technologies and Techniques of Enclosure and Incarceration in “Smart Prison and Detention”
* Do Nonreplicable Findings Have Any Epistemic Value for Science?
* Epistemology of Replicability
* Everyday Resistance: Tactics for Disrupting Surveillance
* Industry-Funded Science and Its Consequences for Reproducibility
* Pervasive Monitoring with Educational Technologies
* The Political Ecology of Renewable Energy
* Political Economy of Surveillance: Platforms and Data Capitalism
* The Politics of Tracking Patients in American Medicine and Healthcare
* Replicability and Epistemological and Methodological Bias
What a beautiful cornucopia.
I guess we live in a society or something
@emilymbender can I just say, the tendency to import science fiction literature as inevitable near future state has been this nagging, inchoate worry that I’ve struggled mightily to articulate, and seeing it laid out so clearly is both humbling and extremely useful. Thank you!