It feeds AI hype in the popular press
Bender et al., July 2020 (Proceedings of ACL 2020, Association for Computational Linguistics). Emily M. Bender (University of Washington) and Alexander Koller (Saarland University) on how researchers describe language models, in their ACL 2020 position paper "Climbing towards NLU", July 2020.
Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data
More from Bender et al. · AI and hype · AI and science · Before ChatGPT
Who else?
What it refers to: Imprudent use of terms such as "understanding" and "comprehension" in academic papers describing large language models like BERT and GPT-2.
Other voices
- “Flawed scholarship threatens to mislead the public” Lipton et al.,
- “There is a huge amount of hype in this area” Yann LeCun, Researcher,
- “Sparks of artificial intelligence” Microsoft Research paper, 2023,
- “AI is harder than we think” Melanie Mitchell,
- “Human evaluators have difficulty distinguishing from articles written by humans” Brown et al.,
- “A fluent spouter of bullshit” Gary Marcus, Researcher,










