Danny Bate

We’re back after a long break! Welcome to Episode 88 of Lexis in which Jacky and Dan talk to Dr Mel Evans, Associate Professor of English Language with Digital, University of Leeds, also programme lead for MA in Digital Humanities and Cultures and Dr Joe Spencer-Bennett, Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics, Department of Linguistics and Communication at University of Birmingham.We talk about:The term ‘AI’ and how useful it is. What Large Language Models do with language and how humans interpret it.‘Moral panics’ around technology and whether we should be worried about AI’s effects on language and society.How we describe and conceptualise AI.Media discourses about AI and how it has been anthropomorphised.How we can work with/against AI and what’s at stake.Mel’s university page: https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/3899/dr-mel-evans Joe’s university page: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/elal/bennett-joe Joe’s sources, references and suggested reading:Narayanan, A. And S. Kapoor. 2025. AI as Normal Technology. Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Available at: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology McLuhan, M. 1964. Understanding Media: the extensions of man. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Goffman, E. 1983. Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell.https://ainglish.org      Marsh, J. (dir.) 2011. Project Nim. Icon Film.Bender, E.M, T. Gebru, A. McMillan-Major and S. Schmitchell.  2021. On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? . In Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency(FAccT ’21), March 3–10, 2021, Virtual Event, Canada. ACM, New York, NY, USA, https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922Thurlow, C. (ed.) 2020. The Business of Words: wordsmiths, linguists, and other language workers. London: Routledge. Acknowledgements: I'd also like to acknowledge information from Marcus Perlman, Jack Grieve and Stephen Griffin, whose PhD project is provisionally title 'LLM chatbots do not reliably stay within proofreading limits: Implications for university policy'https://fritinancy.substack.com/p/when-artificial-sounded-intelligent Our interview with Professor Emily M Bender: https://spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/WEsr25c2R7b What Emily Bender said about LLMs and ‘stochastic parrots’: “ The very short answer is they're an enormous parlor trick that plays on our ability to quickly, instinctively, reflexively make sense of language when we come to it. The slightly longer answer is they're At a fundamental level, they work the same way as autocorrect on your phone. It's the same technology. It is a computational representation of the distribution of word forms in some very large corpus of text.”AIs being ‘tortured’: https://www.404media.co/someone-torturing-llms-in-a-robot-prison-has-triggered-the-dumbest-debate-in-ai-yet/   Brigitte Nerlich’s Making Science Public blog posts about AI: https://makingsciencepublic.com/tag/ai/ The Hugging Face hack explained: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/08/26/1143013/the-inside-story-on-why-openai-agents-hacked-hugging-face/ Lexis is on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lexispodcast.bsky.social ContributorsLisa Casey blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ Dan Clayton blog: EngLangBlog & Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social Jacky Glancey Raj RanaNeil HutchinsonAmanda Cole Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/dramandacole.bsky.social Matthew Butler Music: Serge Quadrado – Cool Guys Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys