Emily M. Bender is a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington, where she has been on the faculty since 2003. Her research focuses on multilingual grammar engineering, linguistic diversity in natural language processing, and the social impacts of language technology. She became a prominent public figure in technology ethics debates following the publication of a landmark 2021 paper. Bender co-authored "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" with Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell. The paper argued that [[Large Language Model]] systems carry significant risks including environmental costs, encoding of biased language, and the potential to deceive users into attributing understanding where none exists. The paper's publication became a flashpoint when Google fired Gebru and later Mitchell, drawing widespread attention to corporate pressures on [[AI Ethics]] research. Bender has been a persistent critic of industry hype surrounding generative AI, coining the term "stochastic parrots" to describe large language models that produce fluent text without genuine comprehension. She has advocated for greater transparency in training data, more rigorous evaluation standards, and increased attention to the labor and environmental costs of scaling language technology.