I’m grateful to be part of a safe and inclusive queer Discord community where Vagrant Gautam (xe/xem/they/them) is also a member. Vagrant is a linguist and computer science PhD student at Saarland University in Germany and Queer in AI interviewed xem about xyr work and journey through NLP:
“It becomes more complicated to define [hopeful building] because I feel so many of the foundations are rocky and unethical.”, Vagrant says “In theory, models like DALL-E are cool and fun and interesting and maybe even hopeful. But you can’t see that in isolation. You can’t look at the output and not think of how a lot of the art was stolen and not credited and artists are understandably upset about that. It is tricky to define hopeful tech because for me hopeful tech needs to be integrated with the community at every level. It needs to be anti-power […]”
You should definitely check out Vagrant’s work as I feel queer perspectives in NLP are super important to the discipline which is very white, cishet, and Anglocentric.
Filed under: education LGBTQ+ linguistics natural language processing people of colour