Parrot or Prophet: How AI is Shaping Language

Have you ever found yourself screaming “I want to talk to a human!” into your phone? In the early days of automated call answering and artificial voices, chatbots would often lead us in pointless circles. These days, you might wonder if you are actually talking to a human — or not.

Large language models have progressed by leaps and bounds, which has introduced both profound and disturbing questions — is AI just spitting out words, or is it capable of creating meaning? What value do our ideas and writing have if they can just be recreated by a machine? Will these models end up helping us — or replacing us? And what does all of this mean for our existence, and what it means to be human?

On this episode, we explore how the fast-evolving field of AI is shaping language and communication. We talk with computational linguist Emily Bender about the dangers of chatbots and why she calls them “stochastic parrots,” hear about how AI is helping to revive endangered languages, and find out how large language models are aiding researchers to gain new insights into an old linguistic experiment.