ChatGP-Why: When, if Ever, is Synthetic Text Safe, Appropriate, and Desirable?

In this talk, Dr. Emily Bender, University of Washington, will overview how language models work and why they can seem to be using language meaningfully—despite only modeling the distribution of word forms. This leads into a discussion of the risks identified in the Stochastic Parrots paper (Bender, Gebru et al 2021) and how they are playing out in the era of ChatGPT. Finally, she will explore what must hold for an appropriate use case for text synthesis.