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What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

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Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#81

Post by AlexandrB »

xgulfie wrote: post #44
TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most humans are stochastic parrots There's a lot more happening behind the scenes when a human repeats phrases than what's happening in an LLM. Sociological phenomenon. The desire to be liked, successful, or popular. The feeling that those phrases brings up. LLMs are not experiencing any of that. As far as we know, neither is a parrot.

Parrots certainly do experience social needs

The "parrot" part of "stochastic parrot" is quite an ambiguous choice. Taken literally, it's referencing an animal that's actually quite intelligent and capable of complex, novel tasks but has no way to connect those to human language. How I've always read this though is the more literary meaning of "parrot" as "a thing that repeats words with no context". Perhaps "stochastic photocopier" would be a clearer metaphor.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#82

Post by paulcole »

andrewla wrote: post #59
paulcole wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stochastic Parrot Nearly all (99%+) people who use this phrase are anti-AI and just looking to show off how much they dislike AI and how clever they can be in insulting it. So it's a great phrase because in just about every case I can ignore what someone says afterwards. Similar to "glorified autocomplete."

At least "glorified autocomplete" is technically accurate, even if vastly underestimating the capability of LLMs. It's just trying to make something very impressive sound trivial. From an external standpoint, talking to another human, it's like the other human says one word and then says the next word. That's just how language works. Humans look like "glorified autocomplete" from this perspective. I mean, looking at…

> one could say that all of physics and creation is "glorified autocomplete"

Exhibit A.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#83

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

andrewla wrote: post #59
paulcole wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stochastic Parrot Nearly all (99%+) people who use this phrase are anti-AI and just looking to show off how much they dislike AI and how clever they can be in insulting it. So it's a great phrase because in just about every case I can ignore what someone says afterwards. Similar to "glorified autocomplete."

At least "glorified autocomplete" is technically accurate, even if vastly underestimating the capability of LLMs. It's just trying to make something very impressive sound trivial. From an external standpoint, talking to another human, it's like the other human says one word and then says the next word. That's just how language works. Humans look like "glorified autocomplete" from this perspective. I mean, looking at…

That’s not how language works https://www.telelib.com/authors/J/JoyceJames/prose/finnegans...

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#84

Post by blululu »

This all sounds like a lot of backpedaling and “well actually” kind of stuff.

“Stochastic parrot got picked up and interpreted by other people as a minimization or an insult. It was not meant that way. Other people might be using it that way but that’s not how I intended it”.

Yeah that’s because it was chosen to be an insulting phrase.. Parroting is only ever used as a pejorative phrase. But sure, everyone else mindlessly parroting this line is the problem here.

This paper was always lousy, but it has really not aged well. We are living in a world when where an LLM has solved an Erdos problem. In a world where LLMs produce novel results that rival human thinking any conceptual reduction of an LLM is going to start inviting some unpleasant comparisons with human thinking.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#85

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

myhf wrote: post #80
Aurornis wrote: post #21

> in part because Google fired two of the authors, Timnit Gebru 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 w…

Pressuring an employee to add unethical behavior or specific religious practices to their job description is constructive termination. I'd say what's under debate is whether uncritical LLM adoption is mainly unethical or mainly religious.

This is not why she was fired and wouldn't have been a plausible reason in 2020 when it happened.

>Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google.

This is Google's side of it; I think the following is a fair piece of primary-source journalism if you want to go deeper:

https://www.platformer.news/the-withering-email-that-got-an-...

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#86

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

andrewla wrote: post #42

For context, here's the main quote: > Contrary to how it may seem when we observe its output, an LM is a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning: a stochastic parrot. I think this metaphor is so strained as to not be useful. I think key here is…

I don't accept that it applies to parrots. Certainly not to Congo African Grey parrots.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#87

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

rob74 wrote: post #66
delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #25

> With the octopus thought experiment, I initially had told the story in terms of a dolphin, because dolphins clearly are intelligent animals. My co-author on that paper, Alexander Koller, said it should be an octopus, because first of all, the environment that octopuses live in is much more distinct from where people live. It makes the metaphor more vivid, that the octopus is just feeling these pulses in the cable a…

Also, last time I checked, the environment where octopuses live is actually the exact same environment where dolphins live?

Well in a sense that monkeys and Great Condor inhabit the exact same environment.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#88

Post by CamperBob2 »

dwa3592 wrote: post #37

I paid a bit of attention to this paper and the phrase 'stochastic parrots' when it came out and i thought this was worth saying and doing at that time. their suggestions about financial and environmental costs are worth studying, their concern about carefully evaluating datasets to feed to the model rather than feeding the entire internet is fully justified. so - to everyone saying this was a bad paper; if you have…

Those costs have to be compared to the way things are currently done without AI.

They never are. Ever.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#89

Post by theragra »

blululu wrote: post #84

This all sounds like a lot of backpedaling and “well actually” kind of stuff. “Stochastic parrot got picked up and interpreted by other people as a minimization or an insult. It was not meant that way. Other people might be using it that way but that’s not how I intended it”. Yeah that’s because it was chosen to be an insulting phrase.. Parroting is only ever used as a pejorative phrase. But sure, everyone else mindl…

Yes, and I don't understand how people like this paper authors mostly disregard all these achievements. It is obvious now that our common definition of "understanding" either is flawed, or at least needs redefining and precisioning.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#90

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #79
softwaredoug wrote: post #61

I don’t see a problem with the “stochastic parrot” label. It just turns out stochastic parrots are incredibly useful. At a minimum it’s probably more accurate than “AI”.

Whether Bender intended it or not, the term has an inherently pejorative sense. "Parroting" is not really indicative of what modern LLMs do. However, when most people bring it up as a criticism of "AI in general" in 2026, they're using it as a pointer to all of the social/environmental criticisms, rather than the technological capabilities.

Why is it not indicative of what LLM’s do?
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