Screencap from linked article, reading: Emily Bender, a linguist who co-authored The AI Con with the sociologist Alex Hanna, reminded me that when we talk about AI, we need to be precise. Many tools that use AI — voice-to-text transcription tools, or tools that will turn a set of text into a study-aid podcast, for example — are not generating something new; they are combining a single individual’s inputs and making them legible in a new format. What Bender is most critical of is what she calls “synthetic media machines” — models that create composite imagery and writing, like ChatGPT, DALL-E3, and Midjourney, using massive libraries of existing material to fulfill a prompt.