What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

I remember being angry about this situation when I first saw it on social media, until I read the details: This person submitted a list of demands to her employer and said that if they weren’t met, she quit. Google wasn’t going to meet her demands so they considered it acceptance of her resignation. There has been a movement trying to debate whether it was a firing or resignation ever since.

The original paper they published gets recirculated every year or two as some landmark history of AI safety, but as other commenters have noted it wasn’t really a great paper nor was it groundbreaking at the time. If not for the controversy surrounding the resignation/firing (depending on your POV), I don’t think it would have been notable.

- Lots of Haiku around, many mistakes unless process is very clear - Some Sonnets, still do mistakes but can adapt - Some Opus, able to improvise and think outside the box.

But even the Human Opus/Mythos are hilariously wrong sometimes.

On a completely tangential sidenote, octopusses are actually very very intelligent: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/octopuses-keep-surprising-us-...

> Meanwhile, O, a hyper-intelligent deep-sea octopus who is unable to visit or observe the two islands, discovers a way to tap into the underwater cable and listen in on A and B’s conversations. O knows nothing about English initially, but is very good at detecting statistical patterns. Over time, O learns to predict with great accuracy how B will respond to each of A’s utterances. O also observes that certain words tend to occur in similar contexts, and perhaps learns to generalize across lexical patterns by hypothesizing that they can be used somewhat interchangeably. Nonetheless, Ohas never observed these objects, and thus would not be able to pick out the referent of a word when presented with a set of (physical) alternatives.

This seems kind of obviously wrong at least in the context of coding agents. These models get trained on actual output of the previous version of the model doing its job, often "IRL" on a real computer/project. It's like O is in the conversation for years now and learning from his own interactions between A O B, where A is the human and B is the computer.

The idea O ontologically has never "observed" "these objects" or referents is philosophically strained. Have I observed the moon, or a finger pointing at the moon? Have I observed `sed` more than Fable?